The LEGO Group has unveiled its latest LEGO Ideas release, releasing a batch of promotional images for fan designer Maia Wenstock’s Women of NASA set, which is set to hit stores worldwide on November 1st. The set features four minifigures – Nancy Grace Roman, Margaret Hamilton, Sally Ride and Mae Jemison – as well as three LEGO builds illustrating their areas of expertise: the Hubble Space Telescope, Space Shuttle Challenger, a bookshelf representing the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) onboard flight software source code. Take a look at the promotional images here…
“In all realms of science, engineering, and technology, pioneering women have historically been underappreciated for their often groundbreaking work. We have also seen that when girls and women are given more encouragement in the STEM fields, they become more likely to pursue careers in these areas,” said Weinstock. “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.”
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 the set include just four, as Katherine Johnson chose not to be part of the set. Tara Wike got to visit the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to present the final Minifigure designs to Maia Weinstock and Margaret Hamilton, who is one of the scientists immortalized in LEGO shape.
“It was a great experience to give these amazing women their new LEGO identity and a great honor to personally present Margaret Hamilton with her very own Minifigure,” added LEGO Design Manager Tara Wike. “What they have achieved is truly inspiring to me, and I hope it will inspire children to make their dreams come true.”
