Saturn V MoF

STEM Moon Shot – Museum of Flight

It’s day five here for us as we continue with STEM Moon Shot at the Museum of Flight in Seattle.Saturn V

The first stage of the rocket is nearly complete, and all our wonderful volunteers are powering through the sections with all the young people that have signed up for the event! 

The amount of young people coming through and asking such inquisitive questions is quite astounding, everyone seems fascinated by the scale of the project and they can then relate this to the mammoth task that the Apollo Project was trying to achieve.

As I write this, Scott has just placed the second section on to the Rocket, giving it some impressive height, and we aren’t even halfway yet!! We are still motoring on, and the sections are being built thick and fast now, and I cannot stress enough how awesome everyone here at The Museum of Flight has been including all the Volunteers from MoF and Boeing, and all the members of Seattle Lego Users Group!!

If you have been down and got involved with the build, thank you, and don’t forget to tag your pictures with #StemMoonShot and #IdeaBrickWorks

You can follow the progress of the team over the week through our social media channels, on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Youtube.

Brick Sorting

STEM Moon Shot – Museum of Flight

We’ve arrived at Seattle’s Museum of Flight and have begun the sorting of the 119,000 or so LEGO bricks required for the event, where we will be building a second Saturn V rocket!

Brick Sorting

This event in conjunction with The Museum of Flight is part of the museum’s celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The build of the Saturn V commences on Friday morning intending to finish on Sunday afternoon and young people from the age of 7 – 17 are invited to register with the museum to participate in the build of the rocket. You can sign up by heading over to the museum’s website or clicking here.

The 11.5ft rocket has been redesigned since the initial outing in 2018 where a few subtle changes have been made to bring it closer to the original Saturn V rocket.

You can follow the progress of the team over the week through our social media channels, on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Youtube.

Behind the scenes of STEM Moon Shot with BrickJournal

This fun article came out of a long conversation with Joe Meno as I was unloading and assembling the Saturn V rocket at Brickslopes last summer.

Joe is the creator and editor of BrickJournal, one of the most respected publications dedicated to the LEGO building community, and I have the privilege to call him a good friend. Thank you, Joe, for allowing me to post this PDF of the article.

I strongly encourage you to check out the BrickJournal website and subscribe to the magazine, which includes builder interviews, events and conventions, reviews, building instructions, and much more. Joe offers both print and electronic versions at a very reasonable price.

From idea to kit: a discussion with Eljay Johnsen

Eljay and I talked for almost two hours on all sorts of topics related to LEGO, but mostly about the STEM Moon Shot event and how I go about making kits. Someday, he and I are going to do a series on how to make your own kits… hopefully sooner than later!

Eljay Johnson, creator and host of The Eljay Johnsen Show, is a recognized expert in Bionicle building. He lives in Boise, Idaho (as do I), and we met when he saw and purchased one of my Brick Idaho kits. Eljay is a member of our IdahoLUG, so you’ll often see him and his fantastic MOCs at our meetings and events!

Subscribe to his YouTube channel and listen in when you get a chance. He is also on Twitter as @TheEljayJohnson where he normally announces his guests a few days before they appear.

The art (and fun!) of the mosaic

One of the activities on February 3 will be helping to build a mosaic out of LEGO elements.

Every digital photograph, screen, monitor, or other electronic display uses pixels to make an image. LEGO can become the pixels in a fun way to reproduce or create artwork.

What will you make at STEM Moon Shot? You won’t know until the whole thing is made and revealed in the afternoon. I will give you a hint… it is NOT a picture of a moon rocket!

Diving into the Apollo 11 flight plan

As you come to STEM Moon Shot area, you will get your Flight Plan to begin your exploration of the event and BSU’s Engineering & Science Festival. Well, this has a basis in the Apollo program AND every spaceflight since NASA started sending rockets into space.

A flight plan is an incredibly detailed and “engineered” document that allows all members of both the ground crew and spacecraft astronauts to complete their mission. Every aspect of the mission is planned down to the minute–even down to the second at certain points.

Look at these pages and you will see some of the significant milestones of the Apollo 11 Mission that landed humans on the moon!

Exploring the Apollo program

As a child of the 60s, space exploration was my life. I watched when Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon. I followed every mission and dreamed of being an astronaut.

Around the STEM Moon Shot main build, I am going to be displaying artifacts that I collected over the years, including stuff that I wrote NASA (no email or internet, remember) and what they mailed back to me! Also a couple of books and interesting stuff related to the Apollo program.

Stickers for the micro Saturn Vs

We have stickers! Signs Now on Orchard did a great job printing the wonderful work of Jonny Smith (the project’s Graphic Designer). These will make the Micro Saturn Vs look like they can fly! More about the Micros in a future post.

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It’s not a competition without prizes…

What would be appropriate awards and prizes for STEM Moon Shot… let me think… LEGO, that’s it, LEGO! Here are the prizes for the event that will be distributed throughout the day. Most are related to the Design within Constraint activities, but there will be some other opportunities to win. Yes, there is a Saturn V peeking out from the back!

Here’s a larger image to see it all:

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LEGO Free Build

What would you do with 20,000 LEGO bricks? What could you build? Over the next few days before the STEM Moon Shot event, I am going to give a little background on what activities will be available. Something we have at most of our events is the free build table. Kids are invited and encouraged to… FREE BUILD! The creativity is astounding.

Come and join the making and use brick to make a spaceship, an astronaut, a planet, or something no one has imagined. You can’t take your build with you (we need the brick for other events for more kids), but you can display your creation at the Best of Free Build table. We really do not want to have to judge the wonderful things kids do so all entrants will be entered into a raffle to win a LEGO prize!

These pictures are from various events over the past couple of years, but I think you will agree…there is creativity and fun outside of the directions!