![]() ![]() Weinstock:I actually have a blog post that goes into some detail about how I made this decision. ![]() : So, choosing to do a set about Women at NASA goes along with your career writing about space and science, but tell me a little more about why you selected these particular women. And I'm just really ecstatic about this whole thing. But I have been in touch with the Lego Ideas team for a little while. And I actually did hear back from the Lego folks a little while ago, but I wasn't allowed to say anything. So it was pretty quick, but it's been a long waiting game since then because the review period didn't actually start until, I think, September. So clearly, this touched a lot of people and inspired a lot of people. And somehow we got to 10,000 within two weeks! But it's really hard to get 10,000 votes, actually, as I had actually learned in the previous year with another set that I tried out. I submitted it, and then there's this process where you have to get enough votes from the community. I planned it around the winter of 2015/2016, and I wanted to launch it for July 20th, which is the anniversary of the 1969 Apollo moon landing. I mean, nothing like this has ever been posted before, at least in terms of women. And this is something I am passionate about, which is bringing personalities to light. Because I thought this would be something different. I decided to work on specific women, instead of generic women. So I thought would be a perfect combination of highlighting women in STEM and also highlighting women who have contributed greatly to NASA. I've also done a lot of research on the history of women in science and engineering. I had actually proposed another set on Lego Ideas that was not related to science, but at a certain point I just decided to focus on a new project and go towards the area that I have much more experience with, and that is space. Maia Weinstock: I came up with the idea sometime in 2015. : Can you give me a broad overview of how you decided to do the Lego Ideas project, and how it all happened? The five women represented in the set are Sally Ride, the first American woman in space and a STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) outreach specialist (Ride died in 2012) Mae Jemison, the first African-American woman in space and also a STEM outreach specialist Katherine Johnson, a NASA mathematician and computer (the title given to people who did computations before the advent of electronic computers), and a central focus of the movie " Hidden Figures" computer scientist Margaret Hamilton, who led the development of the onboard flight software for the Apollo missions to the moon, and who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016 and astronomer Nancy Grace Roman, referred to by many as the "Mother of Hubble" for the role she played in the planning for the space telescope. The Lego set features minifigures of five important women from NASA's history, along with scenes and props associated with each one. The Women of NASA Lego set will include minifigures modeled after computer scientist Margaret Hamilton, mathematician Katherine Johnson, astronaut Sally Ride, astronomer Nancy Grace Roman and astronaut Mae Jemison. (Full disclosure: Weinstock worked as a staff writer for in 2000.) Her Twitter feed reveals that she has a history of using Lego as a tool for science outreach: For about seven years, Weinstock has been creating Lego minifigures in the likeness of scientists and science communicators, and posting photos of them online. Weinstock is a science writer and editor who currently works as the deputy editor of MIT News at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ![]() Previous Lego Ideas sets that have made it to production include the Big Bang Theory set, the Doctor Who set and the Research Institute set, featuring female scientists and science props, which was proposed and developed by geoscientist Ellen Kooijman. Each set submitted to the program first goes through a public vetting process, in which the set must receive 10,000 votes from the public before being considered by the company. Weinstock built the set and submitted it to the company's Lego Ideas website, which lets fans propose sets that the company should manufacture. ![]()
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