I wasn't sure what I was getting into. Yes, I love LEGOs. (Who doesn't?!?) I played with them extensively as a boy—building castles, X-wings, and battleships, and then throwing my entire collection into a large cloth bag to create entirely new things from the whole mess. All the same, a few decades later, a Saturn V set with 1,969 pieces seemed a bit, shall we say, daunting?

Robert Pearlman, a friend and colleague who knows everything about space, had finagled a pre-release set from LEGO on the condition that his site, CollectSPACE, along with Ars and Space.com, write about its construction. When he asked if I was interested, I jumped at the opportunity. But then when Friday morning came and I showed up at Space Center Houston around 8am, I began to wonder. How long would this behemoth take for a rusty LEGO has-been like myself? (The experts at the Brothers Brick had needed five hours, after all). My wife and kids were counting on going to the aquarium that evening.

I'm happy to report that Robert and I assembled the rocket in four hours and eight minutes. We didn't take many breaks (you can watch the timelapse video above for confirmation of that). And, well, even though we worked pretty hard at it, the process was damned fun. Oh, it was a fair amount of work—more than once I marveled at the idea that NASA had actually built these things for real, at a scale of 110 times larger, and their rockets had to actually breathe fire. But the build remained thoroughly enjoyable.

Building the rocket was, in fact, never tedious. During the construction, I had none of the frustrations of doing some little step wrong and then having to backtrack 10 or 15 steps. I made a few small errors, but they were easily corrected. Most of the time, my principal thought was, "Oh, that was clever," or, "That's really cool." The experience proved empowering for my inner geek.

CollectSPACE

CollectSPACE

CollectSPACE

CollectSPACE

Ron Zaguli

Ron Zaguli

Ron Zaguli

Ron Zaguli

Ron Zaguli

Ron Zaguli

Ron Zaguli

I've visited the Saturn V on Johnson Space Center's campus probably a dozen times in my life. It's immense. But one can appreciate the scale of the operation from an entirely different perspective when building the LEGO set. The "crew" members are so small you almost can't hold onto them. Moreover, as you build the Saturn V, you're going to think about the brave men that went to the Moon for the first time almost 50 years ago. How they sat on top of all that potential energy, ventured truly into the unknown, and changed the world forever.

As much as any toy ever could be, the Saturn V LEGO is a worthy tribute to their achievement—and the other 399,997 Americans who worked on Apollo in the 1960s.

Listing image by CollectSPACE