One of my sons currently attends Oklahoma State University. He and some friends wanted to start a social group of people who were interested in space, and thought “Space Cowboys” would be a great name, since Oklahoma State’s mascot is Pistol Pete and we are the Cowboys.
He was right, it is a great name. So great in fact that there are already several groups in the world called Space Cowboys including one at OSU made up of Engineers involved in designing things for space missions.
They are rethinking the name, but we already did design work. Pistol Pete carries a Ruger Blackhawk .357 Magnum with a 6.5″ barrel:
As we played with designs we had a ray gun we were trying to work into the concept:
Suddenly it dawned on me that we could make the ray gun look like a Ruger Blackhawk! Nothing says “Space Cowboys” like a pair of western six-shooters as ray guns.
We also played with Pistol Pete in space. One of the iconic parts of Pete is his mustache. That, along with his eyes and eye brows really define his caricature:
So we added the mustache and the eyes to a simplistic vector space helmet to get this:
I’m not sure these designs will ever see the light of day apart from this blog. But at least they are here.