Life.com has a great gallery of little models of spacecraft built by NASA engineers.
Photo above is from 1967.
Artists and engineers share this bond: the fruit of their labor is often first embodied in rough, rudimentary form. Namely, a model. Pictured: An early and brilliantly minimalist model of the lunar module that, on July 20, 1969, landed on the moon with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin aboard.