The Lego NASA Space Shuttle with the Hubble Telescope is highly detailed

Lego’s continued efforts to create incredibly detailed replica sets for older builders make it harder to be a financially responsible adult. To help celebrate NASA’s latest success with the landing of another rover on Mars, Lego’s new space shuttle Discovery commemorates one of the space agency’s previous accomplishments: the launch of the Hubble Srhythm Telescope over 30 years ago.

This year also marks the 40th anniversary of NASA’s space shuttle program, so Lego rightly chose Discovery for this set, as no other spacecraft has performed so many space flights and carried so many astronauts. Discovery was also NASA’s first space shuttle to be retired, and while visiting the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, seeing her in person remains a challenge during an active pandemic, the news replica of 2354 Lego pieces. is the next best thing.

Designed at 1:70 the scale of the real spaceship, Lego’s latest version of Discovery (the toy maker has already produced a few Discovery sets) is the largest to date measuring nearly 22 inches long with a wingspan over 13.5 inches. This scale allowed Lego designers to include many additional features this time around, including a retractable landing gear, the retractable Canadarm, a rudder that splits in half to act as an air brake during landings, working elevators and a detailed model bay of the Hubble Space Telescope can hitchhike.

Lego designers seemed to have put so much work into making an accurate replica of the Hubble Telescope as the shuttle that transports it. It’s covered in 108 silver elements – the most never included in a single lego set – and features an open-and-close door revealing the optics inside as well as solar panels that can be attached once the telescope is removed from it. Discovery’s cargo hold. The telescope even has a removable component for those who want to recreate the various service missions from 1993 to 2009 that helped give Hubble a second life.

Like many of its model sets intended for adults, Lego includes brackets that can display the Space Shuttle Discovery and the Hubble Space Telescope separately, as well as a third bracket that can be mounted inside the craft’s cargo bay. spatial so that they can also be displayed together. . Availability is scheduled to start April 1, 2021, with a price tag of $ 200.