LEGO has carved out a pretty capacious corner for itself in the heart of nerd culture. There’s the endless selection of video games based on nerd-adored franchises like Batman and Star Wars. Recently, an engineer constructed a fully flexible prosthetic arm completely out of legos. People love that stuff.
Space, alternately, occupies permanent real estate in the fantasies of science dreamers everywhere. Some members aboard the International Space Station have even taken to Twitter to share their celestial point-of-view with eager Earth-bound space nerds.
Now, it appears that one astronaut wasn’t content with the lacuna of nerd interest between LEGOs and the ISS and took it upon himself to construct a LEGO replica of the space station while actually aboard the ISS.
Satoshi Furukawa, Japanese astronaut and LEGO virtuoso, completed the miniature copy of ISS in about two hours, according to collectSpace.com. “It was a great opportunity for me to have built the LEGO space station,” Furukawa told the website upon returning to Earth. “I enjoyed building it.”
Unfortunately, LEGO models of ISS aren’t as durable as the real ISS and Furukawa had to disassemble his creation shortly after he had finished using it (the model was part of an educational program between NASA and LEGO). Lucky for us, though, the process of his LEGO genius hangs in the immortal halls of YouTube, as you can see below in the video of Furukawa constructing his masterpiece. Amusingly, some creative measures had to be taken in order to ensure that errant LEGO blocks didn’t go floating around the cabin while the crew floated around in zero gravity.