posted 04-29-2019 12:00 AM               

Planetary Blocks makes child's play out of solar system exploration

A new collaboration with The Planetary Society is making space exploration the stuff of child's play.

Planetary Blocks, from Philadelphia design house Chop Shop, collects "20 intriguing bodies from our local celestial neighborhood" and transfers them onto wooden blocks. The solar system set includes eight planets, eight moons, three dwarf planets and one star.

"We hesitate to call these toy blocks because they're designed for more than just kids," writes Chop Shop on its crowdfunding campaign page on the Kickstarter website. "While toddlers will be drawn in by the art of each world, an older child will understand the relative sizes to one another and the vast distances between these worlds."

"But we hope the new data considerations on each block will have curious people of all ages contemplating our celestial neighborhood," writes Chop Shop.

posted 01-01-2020 12:06 PM               

Planetary Blocks were the biggest addition to the store in 2019. This two-year long project, created in partnership with The Planetary Society, was funded on Kickstarter in May. We learned a lot through the prototyping process and approved a final model in September. We are happy to announce that all orders of the blocks will begin shipping in about two to three weeks!

The set comes with twenty blocks — composed of eight planets, eight moons, three dwarf planets, and one star. Each side filled with compelling data about each world including appearance, scale, location/distance, name, core composition, and the missions that explored them. We folded into the set a two-sided 38 x 26-inch supplemental poster with fascinating facts about our celestial neighborhood that wouldn't fit on the blocks.

Order now and your set will arrive by late January!