Lego partners with moon rover firm Lunar Outpost for 'future product and surprises'

Yahoo

04-03-2025

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A new collaboration has Lego getting ready to "blast off" with the help of a company now heading for the moon.
The Denmark-based toymaker revealed on Friday (Feb. 28) that it is working with Lunar Outpost, a space robotics and mobility firm headquartered in Colorado.
"We're thrilled to announce a literally out-of-this-world new partnership with Lunar Outpost!" the Lego Group wrote on its website. "We are teaming up over a shared love of space, the exploration of space and building ridiculously cool things."
Describing the collaboration as "building new frontiers," Lego advised its fans to "keep an eye out for a future product and more than a few surprises along the way."
Related: Private Athena moon lander beams home gorgeous views of Earth from space (photos)
No further information was shared, other than what is coming is happening "later this year," according to a teaser posted to Lego's Facebook page. The post included a graphic of a Lego spaceman minifigure wearing a white spacesuit and waving on the moon. The toy astronaut's square "bootprints" are seen on the lunar surface.
Lunar Outpost shared Lego's post on its own social media accounts but did not offer any more details.
On Jan. 15, a commercial lunar lander launched from Earth carrying the United States' first robotic rover designed to explore the moon. The Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform (MAPP), built by Lunar Outpost, has four specialized wheels and a rocker arm suspension to traverse the difficult terrains found at the moon's south pole.
Lunar Outpost's Lunar Voyage 1 mission, of which MAPP is the key component, is expected to demonstrate advanced navigation systems and test the first cellular network on the moon, the latter a project by Nokia. MAPP is scheduled to land on the moon with Houston-based company Intuitive Machines' "Athena" Nova-C lander on Thursday (March 6).
"Lunar Voyage 1 is not just about exploration — it's about proving that private industry can operate, sustain, and create economic value on the moon," said Justin Cyrus, chief executive officer of Lunar Outpost, in a statement prior to the launch. "These historic accomplishments create real-world lunar infrastructure, resource utilization, and planetary mobility — essential steps toward a lasting human presence beyond Earth."
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To that end, Lunar Outpost is also one of three companies that have been awarded a NASA contract to develop a lunar terrain vehicle (LTV) for the agency's Artemis astronauts to drive on the moon. Working with GM, Goodyear, Leidos and MDA Space, Lunar Outpost's "Eagle" LTV recently completed its first round of NASA tests, where astronauts and engineers interacted with a full-size mockup of the golf cart-sized rover.
Other projects by Lunar Outpost include Trailblazer, the flagship mission for the Australian Space Agency, which will demonstrate the end-to-end use of resources on the moon; and MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment), which in 2021 produced oxygen from the Martian atmosphere as part of NASA's Perseverance rover's mission on the Red Planet.
Whatever the product is that Lego and Lunar Outpost are planning may build off the toy line's recent focus on real exploration of the moon and Mars. In 2023, Lego released a Technic set based on the Perseverance rover and, a year later, introduced a highly detailed model of NASA's Apollo Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV).Other recent Lego kits were based on Artemis program hardware, including the Space Launch System (SLS), the heavy-lift rocket that on its inaugural flight sent four Lego minifigure astronauts (aboard NASA's Orion spacecraft) on a mission around the moon.
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