Prepare yourself for the uplift, space fans, because soon you can recreate one of NASA’s most famous commutes in Lego form.
A new set of construction company recreates the STS-31 mission with the spacecraft Discovery the Hubble Space Telescope in orbit in April 1990. Crews from the spacecraft Discovery deployed the observatory over what became a space exploration period.
The Lego Space Shuttle Discovery Set (MSRP $ 199.99 USD) will be available directly from Lego stores and from Lego.com from April 1st. VIP members of Lego can also purchase a replica of the Ulysses space probe, which orbits and studies the sun and has also been used with the spacecraft. . Limited stock Ulysses are available and will cost 1800 VIP points.
Related: The best space that Lego sets and presents
What’s inside the Lego shuttle Discovery
Included in the 2,354-piece set are both Hubble and the shuttle, including details such as open cargo doors that are opened, functional landing gear and reflective stickers intended to display the cooling radiator that the actual spacecraft had. The completed set is approximately 22 cm by 35 cm by 56 cm and contains two uprights and plates for both the orbit and Hubble.
“I’m really impressed with the way Lego thought about spatial things,” STS-31 astronaut Kathyrn Sullivan, who has an early copy of the set in her home, told Space.com. “They clearly recognize – they know in their DNA – of fun, creativity, imagination and learning. They indicate that in such a rich series of kits … and I think as you get older, there is a different kind of satisfaction to to complete a set, because of the strong emphasis on what was real. ‘
The set is aimed at the adult crowd, unlike numerous other spacecraft sets made for children in recent decades. Sullivan herself did not use Lego as a child, although she did use sets of erectors. She said that the challenges of putting things together the right way – even if you make a mistake during construction – apply even during actual space missions.
“A common saying in the astronaut is that plans are nothing, but planning is everything,” she said. “You get a group of people together to do a mission, and you do a lot of planning and writing a plan. But you know very well that life does not always deliver the conditions you intended.”
The unexpected happens to the engineers who built Hubble. Shortly after the telescope was put into operation, an error was found in the optical system which solved an engineering problem to address the telescope’s nearsightedness. Another shuttle crew, STS-61, visited Hubble in December 1993 to install a corrective optical package to address the problem. Including the trip, five commuters visited Hubble until 2010, which did maintenance and upgrades to keep the telescope up to the 2020s.
Related: Lego’s International Space Station Model is Out of This World
A Lego Designer’s NASA Vision
Lego set designer Milan Madge grew up watching the spacecraft program from England, and used to play with Lego sets in the garden – always dropping bricks in the grass, he told Space.com, to the frustration of his father who wanted to make sets. for him. Madge, who is now based in Denmark, said it was a creative challenge to build a realistic shuttle that would still hold in Lego format.
“We’ve scaled so big for this model,” Madge said. “We’ve done a lot of spacecraft in the past, about half a dozen, but they tended to be quite small to include the solid rocket amplifiers and the tank … the reason to get bigger is that we wanted to catch a lot. small details on. ‘
One of the most difficult design challenges was the boot where Hubble was stored and deployed during several shuttles. The boot should be hollow for maximum realism, but Madge’s design team initially struggled to make sure the front and rear would not fall.
Creative reinforcement of the middle section was eventually deployed, not least to make the landing gear work as well. “We also had to couple the front landing gear and the rear landing gear – and a landing feature – somehow through a hollow boot,” Madge said laughing.
Madge added that he sees the shuttle as a “new expression of how we do spatial things”, building on previous Lego sets that the Saturn V moon rocket, the International Space Station and the Apollo 11 Moon Module to high fidelity. “Going to this scale and targeting this adult market gives you a sense of grandeur and the technical details,” he said of the new spacecraft.
Like most of these previous spaces, the spacecraft one commemorates a major anniversary; On April 12, 2021, the 40th anniversary of the launch of STS-1, the crew voyage that began with the 135 flights of the spacecraft program.
Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.