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Northern B.C. SpaceModel Museum prepares for back-to-school visitors

Museum tours and presentations are on offer as students return to classrooms, using a collection of highly detailed spacecraft models to give young visitors a closer look at technology and missions

Published Sep 16, 2026  •  3 minute read

Proach with a model of the Canadian Alouette program a pioneering Canadian space science initiative that deployed September 29, 1962. Photo by Rob Brown /Postmedia

With another school year underway, Nick Proach is ready to blast off. He’s busy putting finishing touches on a full tour and presentation designed to bring the history of spaceflight to students at Dawson Creek’s SpaceModel Museum.

“The idea is the presentation will work for all ages with minor tweaks,” he said.

Proach is working to complete the museum tour and presentation as students return to classrooms, using the collection of highly detailed spacecraft models to give young visitors a closer look at technology and missions that have shaped space exploration.

As students begin another school year, Proach says the next step is to make the museum more than a collection of models — building a tour and presentation that can put the scale, history and technology of spaceflight directly in front of the next generation.

He pointed to the recent Artemis II mission, which provided NASA with their first crewed lunar flyby in 50 years.

Scale models of the Artemis II rocket and Orion spacecraft are among the exhibits at the downtown museum. The real mission carried Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen and three U.S. crewmates around the moon and back.

The new presentation will touch on Canada in space, from the northern lights to the moon and beyond, and will include development(s) of the world’s successful jet airliner and Canada’s AVRO CF-105 Arrow, Proach said.

The models, designed and built by Proach, show the scale of the 322-foot SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft capsule.

For Proach, the museum is about more than one mission. Since 1994, Proach Models has focused on the history and evolution of 20th and 21st century spacecraft and the possibilities created by decades of space exploration.

His interest was launched much earlier than the 1990s.

Proach built his first model at 11 and was making space models when Apollo 11 landed on the moon in 1969. In 1971, he built a small model of the Lunar Rover before Apollo 15’s mission to the moon. After telling CTV about the project, Proach went on to build the entire Apollo 15 landing site for the network’s coverage of the mission.

Two of Proach’s own pieces have also made the trip into space themselves, travelling to the International Space Station aboard a 2002 space shuttle, and Russian Soyuz spacecraft in 2008.

Today, the museum’s collection traces the development of spaceflight from the early Mercury missions through modern Artemis and SpaceX flights.

Proach said the museum has also undergone changes — an expansion recently doubled the exhibit size and floor space while relocating the workshop, or Mission Control, portion of Proach’s operation. The expansion and student programming come as space exploration turns back toward the moon, and the museum has achieved non-profit status.

The SpaceModel Museum is located at 1125 102 Ave. in downtown Dawson Creek at the former Aspol Motors location. It is open at noon Tuesday through Thursday. For more on this final frontier, see HERE.

RBrown@postmedia.com

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