Here's some legitimately cool news that will make you hopeful for the future: LEGO's newest space-themed play set went on sale 1 November. It is called "Women of NASA," and it is already the number one best-selling toy on Amazon.
"Women of NASA" was pitched to LEGO Ideas in 2016 by Maia Weinstock, a deputy editor at MIT News, where it picked up more than 10,000 votes from the LEGO community, Business Insider reports. LEGO manufactured the set with four of the five women Weinstock included in her proposal: Nancy Grace Roman, an astronomer whose projects included developing the Hubble telescope; Margaret Hamilton, who wrote the Apollo guidance software; Sally Ride, the first American woman in space; and Mae Jemison, the first African-American woman in space.
Weinstock also proposed Katherine Johnson, whose mathematical work on the Apollo and Mercury missions was made famous by Hidden Figures, but LEGO was unable to attain approval from "key people" in time to include her in the set.
Weinstock, who will receive 1 percent of the revenue, which should be a whole lot of money, assuming the glorious prospect of space exploration and its rich history still inspires people to think beyond the infuriatingly stupid discourse of modern-day governance, pitched the set to encourage young girls to enter STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
So, with the future of our fragile civilisation in mind, consider buying this set for your children—or even yourself; hell, definitely yourself—this Christmas.
