New LEGO Set To Feature Female NASA Pioneers

There’s a new LEGO set scheduled for release this November and this one features four women who helped make NASA what it is today. The new set was dreamed up by science editor, writer and fan designer Maia Weinstock. She originally presented the idea on the LEGO Ideas crowdsourcing platform and after a voting period it eventually came to be an official set.

The set features four women who all worked with NASA in various roles, like astronaut, developer and astronomer. The original design included five women, four of which chose, or their families chose, for them to be involved in the process. Katherine Johnson, the NASA mathematician who calculated the trajectory for the first American in space, chose not to be part of the set.

The 231+ piece set will be released on Nov. 1, but Weinstock will be at the LEGO store in New York City on Oct. 28 signing sets before the worldwide release. The set will include pieces to build a Hubble Telescope as well as a space shuttle in addition to four figurines representing female pioneers at NASA. The women included are the Nancy Grace Roman, the “Mother of Hubble,” Margaret Hamilton who designed software for space missions, Sally Ride the first female American astronaut in space and Mae Jemison the first woman of color to travel to space. The women each come with pieces for a small platform and structures that represent the work they did with NASA.

The final Minifigures design was done by LEGO designers Tara Wike and Gemma Anderson. Wike brought the final design to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to show it to Weinstock and Hamilton. “What they have achieved is truly inspiring to me, and I hope it will inspire children to make their dreams come true,” she said, according to a release from LEGO.

The set will go for the suggested retail price of $24.99 and will be available just in time for the holiday season for anyone looking to inspire the LEGO-lover in their life. “With this project, I wanted to spotlight a fantastic group of women who have made seminal contributions to NASA history. My dream would be to know that the first human on Mars — or an engineer or computer scientist who helped her get there — played with the LEGO Women of NASA as a child and was inspired to pursue a STEM career as a result,” Weinstock said, LEGO reported.

In addition to the new set, LEGO announced a challenge that would soon go live on LEGO Life, the social platform for kids that the company runs. The challenge will be meant to inspire children to follow their dreams by asking them to build their dream job and share it on LEGO life using the role models from the new set.