Giant Freakin Robot

Life imitates art, and art imitates life. What about toys equal future, and future equals toys? Besides making me sound like I have something missing upstairs, that notion is the product of an all-caps partnership between LEGO and NASA that indirectly highlights how important having a hobby can be.

From now until the morning of July 31, 2013, LEGO and science enthusiasts can enter a design into NASA’s Missions: Imagine and Build program, with prizes given from both organizations. There are two different categories for you to enter, assuming you match the age requirements. The judges include LEGO execs, as well as an as-yet-unnamed NASA astronaut and another NASA expert.

“Imagine Our Future Beyond Earth” invites anyone 16 and older to open their imagination up to the universe and design what future NASA missions should look like. Of course, the imagination should be tethered to existing mission plans taking place through the 2030s. Remember to keep it classy as well. Rockets are already phallic, so there’s no reason to go overboard. The grand prize winners gets the LEGO CUUSOO Hayabusa kit (modeled after the unmanned Japanese craft) signed by its designer Melody Louise Caddick, recognition and honorable mention on NASA.gov, and a personalized signed lithograph of the unnamed astronaut judge.

Say you’re on the International Space Station and you manage to break every single coffee cup on board. No one is mad at you for practical reasons, since drinking from a cup in space is more difficult than it seems. But one of the cups was for your fellow astronaut’s favorite sports team, and he’s been giving you the stinkeye all day. What are you going to do, call NASA and tell them to ship one up, ASAP? Nope.

You just print one out, that’s all. NASA teamed up with Made In Space Inc. out of Mountain View, California to bring 3D printing into outer space. They’re calling it the 3D Printing in Zero G Experiment, or 3D Print for short. It’s already been tested here on Earth in simulated microgravity, and now they’re getting ready to send the equipment to the International Space Station, which should happen at some point after certification next year.

NASA, already a government leader in engineering-based 3D printing, hopes for a future where entire spacecraft can be manufactured off-planet, saving on transportation and shipping. For smaller projects, they foresee a merge with robotics to allow for the construction of recyclable tools and temporary habitats for manned missions to the Moon, to Mars, or even asteroids.

Before NASA could launch a successful mission to the Moon in 1969 with Apollo 11, scientists and engineers had to figure out certain problems and logistics for the highly risky mission. One of the problems NASA had to tackle was designing a spacesuit for Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins, so they could survive the unknown and deadly elements of space and the lunar surface. The problem was solved by an unlikely source, Playtex.

Warner Bros is developing the bra manufactures’ story of designing a spacesuit for NASA into a full-length feature film based on the author Nicholas de Monchaux’s book “Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo.” According to Deadline, the film will follow an unlikely team of former TV repairman, a car mechanic, and their crew of spirited seamstresses who figured out how to properly design a spacesuit for NASA’s manned-missions to the Moon.

Sally Ride was the kind of person about whom you’ll probably never see a negative word written. A physicist, astronaut, and pioneer, Ride gave space travel to women in the early 1980s, inspiring millions by the trails she blazed. And though she died last year of pancreatic cancer, her name will live on as long as this planet keeps turning. A little less than a month away from the 30th anniversary of Ride’s first space flight, NASA and President Obama made sure of that by holding a national tribute earlier this week called “Sally Ride: A Lifetime of Accomplishment, A Champion of Science Literacy,” which was held at the JFK Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.

“Sally Ride Science is thrilled to be presenting a National Tribute to Sally to honor her lifelong commitment to space exploration, but also to improving science education and to supporting science literacy for all students,” said co-founder and chair member of Sally Ride Science Tam O’Shaughnessy, who was also Ride’s life partner.

It wasn’t just a one-night celebration, either. Ride will posthumously be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom — the highest award presented to civilians — later this year, and a new NASA internship program will bear her name. The Sally Ride Internship is intended to help students from less-than-ideal backgrounds get a leg up in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) by allowing them to work with practicing members of the scientific community around the country.