I have actually seen the balsa Jetex Von Braun spacecraft kit you are talking about.
A friend who is a major balsa kit collector has one. Will ask him to get a picture of it.

I really look forward to seeing that! It sounds very much like what the OP was looking for. It has been a very long time, but I believe the Jetex-powered model I remember seeing was plans, rather than a kit; it may have been just a profile model.

But, I'd be great to see this one!

Here we go. My good friend Richard Ng has graciously dug out this extremely rare kit that is the subject of this thread and allowed me to take a couple of pictures to help answer this question

The kit is the "Space Explorer" from the American Telasco Limited company.

The fuse is faceted with eight sides, but still looks pretty good.

These two pictures show both sides of the small plan sheet.

Enjoy. The kit is not for sale, by the way.

Attached Thumbnails

   

If one were to take a high quality photo of each balsa sheet, a laser cut version could be made in the modern age.

Thanks for digging this up and posting it, tab28682! I probably saw this kit in some hobby shop, back in the 1950s, when I was flying Jetex. With my $3 allowance, though, I almost certainly wouldn't have been able to afford it.

It's not actually the Von Braun ferry rocket, but what seems to be an Air Force (Space Force?) fighter, closely modeled on the Von Braun ship, but only about a fourth or fifth the length, with a single crew member, versus a crew and passenger count of five or so for the Von Braun ship. (Images at http://sharkit.com/sharkit/ferryrocket/ferryrocket.htm seem to show five or six. Somewhere, I've seen a view that shows the interior layout better, IIRC.)

Fascinating, though!

Thanks, again, for this!

ps: I second Jerry Irvine's suggestion.

Well, looks like I could have afforded it: http://www.airplanesandrockets.com/...jan-1959-ma.htm

Did you happen to take any measurements?

I like "experimenting" on the lathe and the construction intrigued me.

Maybe some kind of nose cone "thingy" that turns into a boost glider.

Excuse me...I'll be in the lab.

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Found one of these -- already sold -- on Worthpoint.com: http://www.worthpoint.com/worthoped...jetex-482832827

I am not a member, so I could not check the price w/o signing up, which I'd like to avoid. Anyone on this thread a member?

Interesting model. I wonder how it flew. That is, was it a sort of powered glider, or did it have a ballistic lob trajectory?

A reproduction could likely be flown on mini-motors. Sort of like a balsa version of those foam spaceship "backyard flyers" that Estes produced about ten years back.

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I believe this was powered by a Jetex 50, which had something like an ounce of thrust for maybe eight seconds. The model would have been hand-launched, would have gone into a shallow climb while the rocket motor operated, then transitioned to a pure glide and, with luck, a safe landing. (IIRC: the last time I flew Jetex was in the late 1950s.)

See the right-hand pic in post #13 for instructions for launching the Space Explorer and trimming it for stable flight.

BTW: in spite of its name, Jetex motors were rocket motors, though there were add-on thrust augmenter tubes that surrounded the motors, entraining air and converting some of the motors' under-expanded exhaust to accelerate the air and produce more thrust. That setup, then, was a kind of rocket/jet hybrid. As far as I know, too, the Jetex motors, which were reloadable, were the first reloadable hobby rocket motors.

BTW2: the is a Jetex Wikipedia page, as well as one for guanidine nitrate, its propellant.