Lego's all-female 'Women of NASA' toy set is already selling like crazy

Lego Ideas

Lego's "Women of NASA" mini-figurines, including Nancy Grace Roman, Margaret Hamilton, Sally Ride, and Mae Jemison.

• Lego's new "Women of NASA" toy set went on sale for $24.99 on November 1.
• The product, which a female journalist pitched to Lego, features four famous women from the US space agency who are scientists, engineers, astronauts, and entrepreneurs.
• "Women of NASA" follows a powerful trend of Lego selling toys that are more female-inclusive.

Lego's new "Women of NASA" set is now available, and the product has already risen to the top of Amazon's list of best-selling toys.

The set of 231 plastic pieces costs about $25 and went on sale Wednesday morning. Its instant popularity is not surprising to those who have been following Lego's laudable - and presumably profitable - trend of selling toys that are more inclusive of women.

"Women of NASA" features four mini figurines of pioneering women from the space agency: the astronauts Sally Ride and Mae Jemison, the astronomer Nancy Grace Roman, and the computer scientist Margaret Hamilton.

Each figurine comes with her own backdrop of relevant NASA work, including a mini-space shuttle Challenger for the astronauts and a mini-Hubble Space Telescope.

Lego Ideas

The toy set has a grassroots origin story. Maia Weinstock, a deputy editor at MIT News, submitted her idea for the product to Lego's Ideas community in July 2016. Members on that site create and vote on other users' plans; if Lego picks the idea, creators get a 1% cut of sales and licensing revenue.

Weinstock's submission received more than 10,000 public votes - which led Lego to ultimately refine, manufacture, and sell the "Women of NASA" set. (Lego's giant Saturn V moon rocket set, released in June, came about the same way.)

Lego Ideas

Margaret Hamilton, Lego designer Tara Wike, and science journalist Maia Weinstock hold up the "Women of NASA" kit.

One figurine is missing from Weinstock's original kit proposal, though: Katherine Johnson, a mathematician at NASA whose remarkable story of working on the Mercury and Apollo programs was the focus of the film "Hidden Figures."

"In order for us to move forward with a partner we need to obtain approval from all key people, which was not possible in this case. We naturally fully respect this decision," a Lego representative told Gizmodo in an Oct. 25 story.

You can take a close-up look at the "Women of NASA" set, who it features, and what it includes in our preview of the product.