Space design chamber made in LEGO

A key location in space engineering, recreated using LEGO: this is a copy in miniature of the Concurrent Design Facility at ESA’s technical centre ESTEC in the Netherlands, responsible for originating numerous European space missions.

What looks like a flight control room – with interlinked consoles in front of a multimedia wall – is in fact not a place to steer space missions, but to create them. Teams of experts gather at the CDF to perform ‘pre-Phase A’ studies of proposed future missions, rapidly establishing their initial technical, programmatic and economic feasibility ahead of industrial development.

Compare the build to this real-life view.

This LEGO version of the CDF was produced by ESA systems engineer and CDF team member Robin Biesbroek as an exhibit for ESTEC’s main corridor: “We considered a 3D printed CDF model but realised that this was going to be quite complicated. A colleague of mine knew that I frequently design LEGO spaceships and dragons for my children to build. So he asked if I could design a LEGO CDF and I thought it was a great idea, and a nice challenge.

“First, I took many pictures of the CDF and then converted those to very course bitmaps, where each pixel represented one LEGO block. With those images as starting points, I started designing the CDF in a 3D modelling tool called Bricklink Studio. One challenge was the reflection of the outside rainbow corridor’s colours onto the windows of the CDF. Another challenge was to make all the office chairs and computers fit inside the dimensions of the model, which just fits the glass display case in the corridor.

“It took me a full weekend to design it and the result is a model with over 3000 pieces. I created the building instructions and started building it after we ordered all the pieces. My children helped building it, which took several days, but it was clear that this was not as interesting to them as a dragon!”

As a fan of classical LEGO spaceship designs, Robin included several references to the most famous LEGO spaceship, called the LL928 Galaxy Explorer. Look closely at the design to find them!

Download Robin’s build instructions here.

Find out more about the CDF.