Today, LEGO made our collective hearts warm by announcing a new collection inspired by the amazing Janes working at NASA! Under the headline ‘Ladies rock outer space’, the Women of NASA LEGO set features four minifigures of key women at the forefront of space exploration!
The LEGO Women of NASA set was created and designed under the watch of science editor and writer, Maia Weinstock. With a strong personal interest for space exploration as well as the history of women in science and engineering, Maia’s Women of NASA project was a way for her to celebrate accomplished women in STEM professions.
“In all realms of science, engineering, and technology, pioneering women have historically been underappreciated for their often ground-breaking work. 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.” said Maia Weinstock.
The set depicts four fierce women: Nancy Grace Roman, Margaret Hamilton, Sally Ride and Mae Jemison. Their minifigures feature in three builds, illustrating the different areas of expertise the women brought to their work at NASA, and they look awesome!
Nancy Grace Roman’s build features a posable Hubble Space Telescope and a projected image of a planetary nebula. Margaret Hamilton’s build features a stack of book elements, representing the books of listings of Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) onboard flight software source code. Finallu, Sally Ride and Mae Jemison’s build features a launchpad and Space Shuttle Challenger with three removable rocket stages.
The final design of the Minifigures and set was done by LEGO designers Tara Wike and Gemma Anderson. In the original proposal, five NASA women were included but Katherine Johnson, an African-American mathematician, chose not to be part of the set.
The LEGO Women of NASA will be available for purchase worldwide from 1st November over at the LEGO Website.