Browsing the toy aisle at Target, Ari and Aiden were in for a surprise. There, among the newly stocked Lego sets, was a box with an image of a familiar-looking space vehicle.
"I pointed at the box and said, 'Hey, what's that?' and they said, 'It's MAPP!'" said Andrew "AJ" Gemer, Ari and Aiden's father. "They didn't even know we had a Lego set until the day it was released."
"It was cool to see their faces light up like that," he said in an interview with collectSPACE.
The box for the new Lego Technic Lunar Outpost® Moon Rover Space Vehicle identifies the kit as being for ages 10 and above, but Gemer's 6- and 3-year-old had good reason to recognize the Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform, or MAPP, as the smallest of the three builds in the 1,082-piece kit. That was their dad's robotic moon rover.
Credit: collectSPACE.com The Lego version of Lunar Outpost's MAPP atop a full-size mockup of the commercial moon rover.
Gemer is the co-founder and chief technology officer at Lunar Outpost, the Colorado company behind MAPP and other solutions for lunar surface mobility, commercial space robotics, and space resource utilization. Among other current projects, Lunar Outpost is one of three companies from which NASA will pick a lunar terrain vehicle (LTV) for its Artemis astronauts to use when exploring the moon's south pole.
On Saturday, the day after the Lego set debuted on store shelves, Gemer and his sons, along with other Lunar Outpost representatives, were at Space Center Houston in Texas to celebrate the release. The company set up a booth as part of the center's "Astronaut Days" activities where kids (and their parents) could learn more about the company, play with Lego bricks, and maybe win one of the new $99.99 sets to take home.