It is made from 120,000 bricks and was built by LEGO pro Ryan McNaught, who may or may not be compensating for something with this enormous spacecraft.

The details are amazing. He even included the liquid fuel tanks and the NASA Astrovan. Here’s a fun fact that has nothing to do with LEGOs: Did you know the Saturn V is the only launch vehicle to transport human beings beyond Low Earth orbit?

This amazing LEGO creation will be on display at the Melbourne (AU) Town Hall on the 21st and 22nd of January. If you happen to be in the area be sure to look for it.

Check out more pics of the giant LEGO rocket over on Ryan’s flickr album.

[via The Brothers Brick]

The satellite fell back into the atmosphere and was destroyed, adding to the already hundreds of millions of dollars of lost space investments this year. The satellite aboard the unmanned rocket was called the Meridian military communications satellite. The failed launch took off from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome. There are other rockets set to launch from the same location in the coming weeks, but these recent failures definitely call into question the Russian’s ability to launch rockets successfully.

[via Space.com]

H-57 is the Milan-based advertising company that was behind those cool typographical Star Wars posters. They’ve come up with the Intercontinental Ballistic Design Missile, which is of course, a wordplay on ICBM. The design is pretty interesting, and it must be funny to have something like this sticking out of your USB port.

It’s definitely an fun spin on USB flash drive design. I just wonder if this is a real product or just a one-off promotional. It probably won’t take long for some company in China to make some knock-offs. Hopefully, those ones won’t actually blow up your computer.

[via TrendsNow]

The orbiting hotel will hold seven people in four different cabins with room for a crew in there somewhere. The trip is far from cheap, so only the loaded space geek needs to apply. Visitors will get to the station on a Soyuz rocket, which will take two days and cost £500,000 (~$827,500 USD). Then, the five-day stay on the space hotel will cost another £100,000 (~$165,430). The good news is unlike the ISS, the visitors will get showers with water and good food.

The food won’t be out of tubes, it will be cooked on Earth. The food will head up on the rocket with the travelers and be heated in the microwave on the station.

Rooms will be fitted with cameras and binoculars to check out the Earth and other views of space. I think it would be really cool to visit this hotel, but I am betting it will never come to reality.

[via DailyMail]

The first three flights of the CST-100 space capsule will happen in 2015 if all goes well. The first two flights will be unmanned with the first flight reaching orbit and the second flight being a suborbital test of the launch abort system. The third mission will be manned by two Boeing pilots and will go all the way to docking with the ISS.

The search for the first pilot from a pool of Boeing employees is already under way. Boeing wants the first pilot to join early so that the pilot can have input on the design process for the ship. It’s pretty cool that someone from the private sector is going to become a real astronaut.

[via BBC]

The ISS tips the scales at around 450 tons here on Earth. The Chinese station will weigh only 60 tons. It will have one primary module, which you see in the photo here. It will also have two experiment modules and extra docking ports for additional spacecraft.

China plans to launch the main module this year and two other modules will come thereafter. The docking hardware will allow the Chinese station to dock with the ISS, assuming the Chinese are invited to the ISS party.

[Space.com via Dvice]

The ULA is a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin and is designed to make it cheaper to send things into space. The agreement will see NASA and the ULA working together to tweak the Atlas V to work for launching people into space. It will take at least four years to get the rocket ready it seems.

The Atlas V has been chosen by several companies already to launch payloads into space. ULA’s main competition in the new space race is SpaceX. SpaceX announced recently that it broke ground on the facility needed to launch its larger and more powerful Falcon Heavy rocket.

[via PhysOrg]

The Dawn spacecraft will continue to orbit and study Vesta for the next year. Among the things that the scientists on the project hope to figure out is why the asteroid is so bright. After studying Vesta for a year, Dawn will take off and head towards the biggest asteroid in the belt called Ceres.

Vesta is as large as the state of Arizona at 330 miles wide. Some astronomers consider Vesta a protoplanet. Ceres makes Vesta look tiny at 590 miles wide. Ceres is considered a dwarf planet. The good news is that Steve Buscemi and Bruce Willis are still around so if Ceres ever heads towards Earth, we can spirit them up there with some nukes and an oil drill to blow the asteroid up.

[via MSNBC]

SpaceX is the company that we have talked about before that shot a wheel of cheese into space on one of its rockets. They also are working on a rocket that makes all others that are in service today look puny, called the Falcon Heavy. The beast has 27 SpaceX Merlin engines, can loft 117,000 pounds into orbit, stands 223-feet tall and weighs in at 3.1 million pounds. The company has announced that it has broken ground on its launch facility at Vandenberg Air Force base, specifically for the giant rocket.

The groundbreaking was this week and SpaceX is sinking $30 million into the refurbishing of the launch site known as Space Launch Complex 4-East at the base. The goal of the launch site is to land SpaceX some contracts to put military satellites into orbit.

[via Space.com]

The rocket cost just £42,000 (~$69,000 USD), and is designed to hold one person inside and loft them into the atmosphere – and perhaps someday into orbit. The team attempted to launch last year, but the rocket failed after the HAIRDRYER they were using as a heater inside the rocket malfunctioned. This year apparently the hairdryer worked fine and the rocket left its small sea platform.

It climbed to about 2 km into the air before it started to veer off course. The team feared it would leave their designated testing area and turned the engine off remotely. To make matters worse, the parachute that was supposed to let the rocket splash safely into the sea failed to fully deploy. Luckily, the passenger in the rocket was only a dummy, not a person. Here’s a pilot’s-eye view of the brief flight:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

[via New Scientist]

You’ll never guess what its last weapon is. Brace yourself for 5 minutes and 11 seconds of increasingly absurd weaponry and dinosaur slaughter:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

The music was so bad but somehow it made the video much more awesome. And now I can’t get the stupid guitars out of my head. You can still find the Tomy i-SOBOT at Amazon for $250 (USD), which incidentally is $50 more than its price when we featured it almost 2 years ago. Weapons not included.

[via Topless Robot]

Instead of just beeping when it’s time to get up, the Rocket Launcher Alarm Clock offers up a vocal countdown every morning, then fires a rocket into the air if you don’t turn it off before the timer runs out. If you don’t get to it before lift-off, you’ll have to run across the room, pick up the rocket, and place it back on the clock base to stop the alarm. And just in case you were worried about it, the rocket has a squishy foam tip, so you don’t need to worry about it poking your eye out when it lands on your head.

Ready to blast off into space? If you live in the UK, find one at DrinkStuff for £14.67 or in the States, head over to Perpetual Kid and plunk down your $25 bucks.

The Shenzhou VII rocket phone conjures up images of 1950s science fiction with its orange spaceship design. While it is definitely different, the shape isn’t particularly practical. In addition to being too big to fit comfortably in your pocket, it’s just a little too phallic for me. I just envision trying to go through airport security with one of these and a very Spinal Tap moment would ensue.

[Phonedaily via Le Journal du Geek]

They successfully deployed 965 model rockets at the same instant, smashing the previous record of just under 400 rockets. Check out this video of the launch:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Congratulations to Cub Scout Pack 990 and Boy Scout Troop 990 for pulling off this amazing feat!

[via Engadget, photos via fauxtoe]

The TAM Rocket Belt is a complete rocket pack system which is custom fitted to the exact specifications of the pilot. It can lift a person of up to 300lbs., and has flown to heights over 100 feet in the air. It even includes the equipment necessary to make your own rocket fuel (using highly pressurized peroxide, so it’s not combustible.) They even throw in 10 training flights to make sure you don’t kill yourself before you take it home.

The only downside is that it only holds enough fuel to propel you into the air for about 10 to 15 seconds, so you won’t be going very far.

[via Geekologie]