Lego made bricks with meteorite dust and they are on display in some stores

There are plenty of Lego sets featuring astronauts, but now there are Lego bricks made from what astronauts discover in the void. Danish brick maker ESA is going to make Lego pieces from real meteorite dust. Pretty cool, right? They’re on display through September 20, including at the company’s big Fifth Avenue location in Manhattan.

This project isn’t just for laughs, but it’s actually pretty fun. This is a proof of concept to show how astronauts could use lunar dust to build lunar structures. Imagine the amount of energy and money needed to transport building materials from Earth to the Moon. It would be a real revolution if we could build everything from pre-existing lunar materials.

There is a layer of rocks and mineral deposits on the surface of the Moon called lunar regolith. It was long thought that regolith would be necessary. It is readily available and there are several prospective methods for processing it into building materials. After all, humans have been building structures with dirt, dirt, and sand for thousands of years.

However, there isn’t much lunar regolith here on Earth for people to experiment with. ESA scientists have made their own regolith by crushing a very old meteorite. The dust from this meteorite was transformed into a mixture used to 3D print Lego pieces. So. Moon bricks. They fit together like regular Lego bricks, although they only come in one color (space gray obviously.)

“No one has built a structure on the Moon, so it was great to have the opportunity to try out all sorts of designs and construction techniques with our space bricks. It was both fun and useful for scientifically understanding the limitations of these techniques,” said Aidan Cowley, ESA’s chief scientist.

Humanity is on the verge of reaching its first true lunar base. NASA has teamed up with the Italian Space Agency and Thales Alenia Space Corporation to build the first permanent human outpost on the Moon, although that won’t happen until at least the 2030s. Recent designs Lunar habitats range from something resembling a mobile home to .

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