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Their Cape Canaveral will be the rocky moonscape of an old gravel quarry huddled on the seemingly endless space of the southern Alberta prairie.

If all goes according to plan from an open-air mission control, the Kronos E, a 1:20 scale replica of the Saturn V rocket that took Apollo 11 astronauts to the moon 50 years ago next month, will achieve liftoff around 9 a.m. on Saturday.

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Calgarian Shane Weatherill wasn’t old enough to witness that momentous event on TV five decades ago, but the prospect of paying tribute by lofting the largest model rocket in Canadian history is a giant leap in itself.

“To most of the people in this hobby, the moon landings are the culmination of the space program, though NASA has done a lot of cool things since,” Weatherill, 45, said Thursday as he helped set up the launch site about 100 kilometres southeast of Lethbridge.

“The Saturn V rockets are epic . . . I’ve seen these re-creations happen in the U.S. but not in Canada.”