Lego is honouring the women of NASA with this cool new set

Lego’s latest set should make space-geek feminists very happy.

The company is developing a new Lego set featuring five historic women who contributed to NASA’s space program. MIT News editor Maia Weinstock created the set, called Women of NASA, and submitted it to the Lego Ideas competition. It racked up the 10,000 votes required for Lego to mull manufacturing it, and now Lego has announced it will make the concept into a real set you can buy.

• Watch NASA’s year-long timelapse of Earth from a million miles away

The five women include computer scientist Margaret Hamilton, who developed the on-board software used in Apollo missions to the moon, physicist and mathematician Katherine Johnson, who calculated trajectories and launches for NASA missions such as Apollo 11, astronaut and physics professor Sally Ride, who became the first American woman in space, NASA executive Nancy Grace Roman, who is known for her work on the Hubble, and astronaut Mae Jemison, who became the first African-American woman to travel to space.

Thrilled to finally share: @LegoNASAWomen has passed the @LEGOIdeas Review and will soon be a real LEGO set! https://t.co/rcyjANsVD9 pic.twitter.com/b9OVx5UBaL

— Maia Weinstock (@20tauri) February 28, 2017

According to the BBC, Weinstock made the set because she wanted to encourage girls to pursue STEM fields like engineering, science, and mathematics, and she wanted boys to “internalise at an early age that these careers are for everyone, not only men.”

Lego should start selling the set this year or in early 2018.