This is the new Lego® Tintin Moon Rocket, it measures in at almost half a meter high (49cm or 1′ 7″) and consists of the main rocket, and a crew of Tintin, Captain Haddock, Professor Cuthbert Calculus, Thomson and Thompson, and of course, Snowy.
Tintin’s Moon Rocket is one of the most famous fictional rockets in history, and the story of how it came to be is quite remarkable, with ties to Wernher von Braun who would later run NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center during the all-important Apollo 11 mission to the Moon.
The Tintin Moon Rocket appeared across two Tintin volumes, Destination Moon (published in 1953) and Explorers on the Moon (published in 1954). In the story, Professor Calculus first tests an uncrewed prototype, the X-FLR6 (closely modelled on the V-2) before launching the full-scale crewed rocket. Image courtesy of Egmont.
History Speedrun: The Tintin Moon Rocket
The creation of Tintin’s now legendary Moon rocket can be followed all the way back to the late 1940s, just after the end of WWII. In the autumn of 1947, Hergé’s friend (and scientific consultant) Bernard Heuvelmans co-wrote a draft script with Jacques Van Melkebeke proposing a lunar adventure for Tintin, but Hergé shelved it, uneasy with the somewhat political tone of the storyline.
A couple of years later in 1949, while working on Prisoners of the Sun, he committed to the idea on his own terms, setting the adventure in the fictional state of Syldavia to avoid Cold War entanglements between the USA and Soviet Union, and keep Tintin more neutral.
Hergé threw himself into research completely, consulting Heuvelmans’ book L’Homme parmi les Étoiles (1944) and Alexandre Ananoff’s L’Astronautique (1950). But the single greatest influence on the rocket’s design was the work of German rocket engineer Wernher von Braun, the creator of the wartime V-2 – the world’s first long-range ballistic missile.
Hergé found illustrations of the V-2 in Leslie Simon’s 1947 book German Research in World War II, and the rocket’s famous red-and-white checkered livery was borrowed directly from real-world rockets – checkerboard patterns painted onto V-2 fuselages allowed observers to track roll and spin during the critical early phases of launch. To ensure accuracy, Hergé had his assistant Arthur Van Noeyen build a physical model of the rocket, which he then took to Paris for Ananoff to evaluate for realism.
The rocket appeared across two Tintin volumes, Destination Moon (published in 1953) and Explorers on the Moon (published in 1954). In the story, Professor Calculus first tests an uncrewed prototype, the X-FLR6 (closely modelled on the V-2) before launching the full-scale crewed rocket.
This is the new Lego® Tintin Moon Rocket, it measures in at almost half a meter high (49cm or 1′ 7″) and consists of the main rocket, and a crew of Tintin, Captain Haddock, Professor Cuthbert Calculus, Thomson and Thompson, and of course, Snowy.
It was nuclear-powered, single-stage, and fully reusable. The entire vehicle flew from Earth to the Moon, landed tail-down, and returned intact, following what NASA would later call a “direct ascent” mission profile. In the story, Tintin became the first human to walk on the Moon, landing in the Hipparchus Crater. Interestingly, when Neil Armstrong touched down 15 years later, his landing site in the Sea of Tranquillity was located just north of the crater Hergé had chosen for his own fictional mission.
The man whose V-2 designs inspired Hergé’s fictional rocket was instrumental in making the real landing happen. By 1960, von Braun had become director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and chief architect of the Saturn V – the launch vehicle that sent the Apollo 11 crew to the Moon on the 20th of July 1969.
The New Lego® Tintin Moon Rocket
This is the new Lego® Tintin Moon Rocket, it’s the first ever Lego Tintin set, and it’s based on the famous red-and-white checkered rocket from Hergé’s Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon, stories first published in the early 1950s, more than 15 years before a real-life lunar landing took place.
The 1,283-piece set stands over 19.5 inches (49 cm) high, finished in the rocket’s famous checkered pattern, and it has a panel in the cone that can be opened to reveal a detailed control room inside.
The set actually originated as a fan submission on the Lego Ideas platform by Portuguese designer Alexis Dos Santos, known by the alias Tkel86, who combined his love for The Adventures of Tintin with his love of the Lego Technic Space Shuttle to arrive at the concept.
After reaching the required 10,000 fan votes and passing through the Lego Ideas review process, the project was handed over to the Lego design team, who worked in close collaboration with Dos Santos throughout development to bring the final set to life.
This is the new Lego® Tintin Moon Rocket, it’s the first ever Lego Tintin set, and it’s based on the famous red-and-white checkered rocket from Hergé’s Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon, stories first published in the early 1950s, more than 15 years before a real-life lunar landing took place.
The set includes five minifigures and Snowy. Tintin appears with his signature spiked ginger hair and a detection device, alongside Captain Haddock with his trademark black hair and beard, Professor Cuthbert Calculus with his round-rimmed glasses, and the blundering detective duo Thomson and Thompson – whose hair is bright green (referencing their accidental ingestion of the chemical Formula 14 in Tintin and the Land of the Black Gold). Snowy completes the crew in his own miniature space suit, there’s no way he could have been left out of course.
The Lego® Tintin Moon Rocket is now available for pre-order here, with sets shipping out on the 1st of April.
Images courtesy of Lego
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