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If you think this is Atlantis on the pad, awaiting its May 12th mission to service Hubble, look again.
Yeah, that’s a Shuttle made entirely out of LEGOs. 65,000 or so of them, in fact.
Wow.
If I had that kind of spare time to construct a 65k LEGO Shuttle, I’m not sure what I’d do with it. Start a blog, maybe.
You can find out more about this insane construction project at DVICE and Kirainet.
If you went to BadAstronomy.com and found yourself here, never fear: the BA Blog has moved to its new home at Discover Blogs. The original BA site (with the Moon Hoax debunking and all that) is still online, too.
Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
Contact me: The Bad Astronomer "at" gmail "dot" com
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April 6th, 2009 at 2:14 pm
It sure will be nice when the economy recovers and people won’t have too much time on their hands anymore.
April 6th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
1) Awesome.
2) Be nice to know how big it is. The DVICE site mentions a guess of around a few feet.
3) That had to be expensive to build. LEGOs ain’t cheap.
April 6th, 2009 at 2:29 pm
@ Romeo
Yeah, It’ll be great to go back to working 70+ hours a week to make ends meet so we won’t have time to do crazy cool stuff like this. :p
April 6th, 2009 at 2:44 pm
….1590 hours… that’S… more than 2 months, right?
Wow… I have too much life to achieve that amount of awesome.
April 6th, 2009 at 2:50 pm
[...] shuttle I almost put this in Space Exploration. The BA just blogged about this model of the shuttle, made from Lego! You have to check it out. __________________ At [...]
April 6th, 2009 at 2:51 pm
i had a lego set which depicted the shuttle on a launch pad, it wasn’t accurate in terms of scale.
(homepage links to box image of lego set)
April 6th, 2009 at 2:58 pm
I must have a very poor ability to estimate quantities by volume, because judging by the size of the shuttle versus the LEGO Men in that video it’s hard for me to believe there’s 65,000 LEGO bricks there.
April 6th, 2009 at 2:58 pm
I miss Construx.
April 6th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
I adored Space Legos back in the 80’s. My kids have the newer Lego sets but the ones toady aren’t nearly as cool.
April 6th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
Yeah. Somebody’s got too much time on their hands.
April 6th, 2009 at 3:32 pm
In the future… our entire civilization will be made of legos.
April 6th, 2009 at 3:50 pm
@Kevin F.
My kids love my Space Lego sets from the 80’s
April 6th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
anyone else get a spam message (at least it looks like a spam message, maybe i was signed up for something I forgot signing up for, sadly plausible) with this subj?
ATTN ScienceBlogs/Bad Astronomy/Yuri’s Night: Lights. Action… Welcome Aboard the Crazy ‘Murder-Suicide’ Train in the Blizzard of Ozz!
Then there’s a bunch of oddness. Weird that its got ScienceBlogs/Bad Astronomy in it… is it spam, or what? I’m confused. Don’t want to post any links, obviously.
April 6th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
LEGO. The plural of LEGO is LEGO. Like deer or moose.
Carry on.
April 6th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
What do 65K LEGOs cost? 65K dollars?
-Sean
April 6th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
The Shuttle, snapped tite | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine
If I had that kind of spare time to construct a 65k LEGO Shuttle, I’m not sure what I’d do with it. Start a blog, maybe.
April 6th, 2009 at 5:48 pm
A google translate of the page shows a commenter mentioning a size of 4.4 meters, but I never noticed that figure in the article.
Sean, basic bricks only cost a few cents a piece, but no matter what this would be an expensive thing to make.
April 6th, 2009 at 6:51 pm
Oh Snap! He didn’t?
April 7th, 2009 at 2:46 am
[...] brobof’s blog Just another WordPress.com weblog « Russian Roundup Three decades of building in the Infinite Heavens April 7, 2009 That naughty astronomer Phil Plait has a LEGO moment: [...]
April 7th, 2009 at 2:56 am
That naughty astronomer Phil Plait has a LEGO moment:
[...]Wow![...] and I’m impressed too![...]
Space Police Ver 3.0 is coming:
“In annos triginta ad caelum infinitum construxit.”
Classic!
April 7th, 2009 at 3:09 am
LEGO are going to come down on you like a ton of bricks for using their name incorrectly. It’s LEGO bricks, not LEGOs as Ross said.
April 7th, 2009 at 4:17 am
I have a space shuttle of LEGO myself. If I put in some new batteries it is even able to open its payload bay doors and “deploy” a satallite
It’s really cool! When I put all my LEGO into boxes to put it into the cellar, I left it behind, it looks so good 
I hope that, in a far future, my kids (when I have some…) will enjoy it as much as I did!
April 7th, 2009 at 4:29 am
It is very annoying when people comment (while browsing the web, no less) that “people have too much time on their hands” to do interesting stuff. But it’s all okay if they’re getting paid to do it, right? Argh, I guess the jealousy is understandable though.
“Yeah, It’ll be great to go back to working 70+ hours a week to make ends meet so we won’t have time to do crazy cool stuff like this.” Well said, MarkH.
April 7th, 2009 at 6:27 am
@ Ross, I agree on the plural, it just doenst sound right as “Lego’s”. Is it only in the UK we do that or is it just in US that they say Lego’s?
April 7th, 2009 at 6:39 am
Average price for LEGO elements is about $.10, so at the top end this cost about $6500. However, lots of the more common bricks cost less, and it looks like this was made using the four of the most common colors (red, white, black and grey), so it probably cost a lot less. Still several thousand bucks, tho…
BUT, I have to say, that it bugs me a bit to see so many people kvetching about “people having too much time on their hands”. LEGO is a hobby like any other (and some would say an artistic medium as well) and like any hobby, if you are into it, it eats up a lot of time. I’m sure there are plenty of people who would consider people who spend hours at a time looking up at the stars to have “too much time on their hands”…
Or maybe I’m just a touchy AFOL (Adult Fan of LEGO) AND astronomy!
April 7th, 2009 at 6:40 am
correction:
Or maybe I’m just a touchy AFOL (Adult Fan of LEGO) AND astronomy buff!
oops!
April 7th, 2009 at 11:51 am
The standard “2×4″ brick (the one you think of when you think Lego) can be had for 16 cents US. That would mean this model cost just over $10,000 US assuming they paid retail. Hopefully they worked out a deal to get parts at wholesale!
April 7th, 2009 at 11:51 am
**It is very annoying when people comment (while browsing the web, no less) that “people have too much time on their hands” to do interesting stuff. But it’s all okay if they’re getting paid to do it, right?**
No. In that situation people (probably the same people) complain about what else could have been done with the cash.
**In the future… our entire civilization will be made of legos.**
Someone MUST have tried by now…
April 7th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
Actually the expression “x has/had too much time on their hands” isn’t generally meant genuinely. It’s an acknowledgement of the vast amount of time and effort spent on something of no practical value. Almost everyone who says it actually think that’s pretty incredibly cool. And while there is a certain amount of implicit envy (i.e. “I wish *I* had that kind of time to waste”,) I use the phrase as a prop rather than a dis. I think you’ll find that a lot of other commenters did as well.
April 7th, 2009 at 10:18 pm
Michelle says: “….1590 hours… that’S… more than 2 months, right?”
If they worked non-stop, then yes, it is. But considering that a full time job, averaging 40 hours per week, is generally 2080 hours per year, it’s also roughly the equivalent of working a full time job for 9 months. Yikes!
April 8th, 2009 at 2:37 am
Jeremy, you’re not the only one who misses Construx… *And* Capsela…