In March 2018, Clemens Riegler, a master’s student of satellite technology at the University of Würzburg—and self-titled “Best Rammus in the West”—reached out to us on social media with the message, “Weird question, are there some official Astronaut Teemo or Astronautilus stickers?…”

And almost exactly one year later Astronaut Teemo went to space! Well, sort of... Our devilish angelic little yordle made it roughly 75 km (46.6 miles) into the mesosphere. Technically that’s only near space, not quite outer space. But don’t tell Teemo he isn’t exactly an astronaut, it’s better for everyone that he’s happy.

One Small Step for Teemo

It took more than the 114th ranked Rammus player on EUW to send a yordle to space—it required a team of 24 students from the University of Würzburg and TU Wien, nearly half of whom may be in your next game. Seems having enough Rammus mastery points can tilt Teemo off the planet.

The Daedalus Project formed in the summer of 2016 with the intent of developing and deploying an aerospace landing mechanism without active components or parachutes. The more stable space vehicle they envisioned would allow for better maneuvering in turbulent atmospheres. While they were trying to solve for a safer and reusable landing mechanism for Earth, the team dreamed of space travel on Venus or the ability to gain atmospheric data in Jupiter’s tumultuous atmosphere. This led to the development of the “SpaceSeed."