Lego worked with the European Space Agency to promote building structures on the Moon. You might actually find one in your local Lego store.
In the 5th Avenue Lego store in Manhattan, in the back toward the stairs going to the second level, there’s a small gray brick spinning lethargically on a thin pedestal. According to the Danish brickmaker and European Space Agency, that Lego piece was crafted from meteorite dust. While you won’t see astronauts going into space to try and build the first space edition of Barad-Dûr, the agency claims it’s a small test to see how well Moondust might work for building mankind’s first real lunar structures.
You can’t buy it, and the “Space Bricks” only come in one color—“space gray”—but the stardust building block does look striking up close with its odd wavy lines and dusty appearance you would never see on a modern, pristine Lego piece. According to Lego and the ESA, the meteorite dust was ground off an object first discovered in 2000 in northwestern Africa.
Each brick is not pure meteorite. The 4.5-billion-year-old meteorite dust was mixed with “a small amount” of thermoplastic polyester to let the engineers form it like a Lego piece.
