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.