What do two dinosaur tails, four beehives, six segments of roller coaster track and 88 faucets have to do with a rocket designed to fly astronauts to the moon?
They are all among the repurposed parts, hidden details and "easter eggs" found when building the new Lego Icons NASA Artemis Space Launch System model, now lifting off from store shelves. The $259.99 (€259.99 or £219.99) set, which was released Saturday (May 18), includes both the rocket and its mobile launcher (ML), built up from 3,601 pieces.
Among those many plastic "bricks" are some creative new uses for older Lego sets' custom parts, as well as a few well-placed nods to the toy company's history. The set also packs in a slew of small details from the real Space Launch System (SLS), some of which Lego identifies in the kit's 370-page instruction book, but others assembled without explanation.
The real SLS first launched in November 2022 on NASA's uncrewed Artemis I mission around the moon. The flight marked the inaugural use of the first new mobile launcher built since the Apollo program. NASA's Artemis program will use the same infrastructure to send astronauts back to the moon as soon as late 2025 and aims to then land the first woman, first person of color and first non-American astronauts at the lunar south pole.
