Early on a recent Monday morning, the head of NASA’s science division shared to social media a triumphant photograph of a massive LEGO rocket. Scientific American called Nicola Fox, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, and she revealed that she bought the LEGO set—a mini version of the agency’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket—as a gift for herself. The kit includes 3,601 pieces and stands more than two feet tall when fully constructed. In comparison, the real rocket stands more than 300 feet tall. That rocket saw its first launch in 2022, when it flew Artemis I, an uncrewed test mission around the moon and the first step in the agency’s Artemis program to return astronauts to the lunar surface later this decade.
Scientific American talked with Fox about her LEGO hobby, the recent spate of high solar activity and upcoming NASA science to get excited about.
[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
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Being head of all things science at NASA must give you a different perspective when assembling the LEGO version of a NASA rocket. What was that like?
It’s my stress relief; it’s something that I’ve always done. This time, I won’t say I was in a competition with another person at NASA, but I came home from my international travel on the Friday, and it was waiting for me. I didn’t start it because I was really tired, but because I was jet-lagged, I woke up at four o’clock in the morning, and so I started it. And as I checked social media, I saw a colleague had started theirs. It was fun to build because there were a lot of people from NASA building it that weekend, and so we were all sort of chatting with one another. Like I asked one of them, “Why is…
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