— Browsing the toy aisle at Target, Ari and Aiden were in for a surprise. There, among the newly-stocked Lego sets, was a box with an image of a familiar looking space vehicle.

"I pointed at the box and said, 'Hey, what's that?' and they said, 'It's MAPP!'" said Andrew "AJ" Gemer, Ari and Aiden's father. "They didn't even know we had a Lego set until the day it was released."

"It was cool to see their faces light up like that," he said in an interview.

The box for the new Lego Technic Lunar Outpost® Moon Rover Space Vehicle identifies the kit as being for ages 10 and above, but Gemer's six and three year old had good reason to recognize the Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform, or MAPP, as the smallest of the three builds in the 1,082-piece kit. That was their dad's robotic moon rover.

Gemer is the co-founder and chief technology officer at Lunar Outpost, the Colorado company behind MAPP and other solutions for lunar surface mobility, commercial space robotics and space resource utilization. Among other current projects, Lunar Outpost is one of three companies from which NASA will pick a lunar terrain vehicle (LTV) for its Artemis astronauts to use when exploring the moon's south pole.

On Saturday (Aug. 2), the day after the Lego set debuted on store shelves, Gemer and his sons, along with other Lunar Outpost representatives were at Space Center Houston in Texas to celebrate the release. The company set up a booth as part of the center's "Astronaut Days" activities where kids (and their parents) could learn more about the company, play with Lego bricks and maybe win one of the new $99.99 sets to take home.

Beyond the MAPP

The first (real-life) MAPP arrived on the moon on March 6, three days after Lego teased at a "future product and more than a few surprises" with its announcement of the Lunar Outpost partnership. The Danish toy brand had worked with NASA before, but this was its first joint effort with a private space company.

"For generations, the Lego Group has been creating amazing space sets that empower children and space-enthusiasts to reach for the stars and expand their imaginations," said Daniel Meehan, creative lead for space at the Lego Group, in a statement. "This new Lunar Outpost Lego Technic model builds upon this legacy, celebrating a new chapter in space exploration and the extraordinary discoveries to come."

Unfortunately, the commercial lunar lander on which MAPP rode to the moon tipped over and trapped the bread-box size, four-wheeled rover inside its "garage."

Fortunately, the Lego set and Lunar Outpost were already focused beyond that first MAPP.

"There are threads for our whole company's history, philosophy and our vision for the future woven throughout the set," said Gemer. "It includes the ISRU [in-situ resource utilization) processing plant. It has a rover that goes and collects the resources — the balls and crystals — and brings them to the plant."

"It also has themes of multi-scale robotics. There is a large rover that can deploy a smaller rover, a parent and child rover type architecture, which is something that we really want to see on the moon," he said. "And then, features like the robotic arm doing the manipulation. So yeah, it has a lot of tie-ins to what we plan to do in the future."

The set's large, main futuristic rover with its rocker suspension, four-wheel steering, deployable solar panels and rotating arm is not based on any specific vehicle Lunar Outpost is building now, but was inspired by the company's plans.

More to come

"We have five lunar surface missions in total booked, One of the upcoming ones is really cool. It's with the Australian Space Agency, so it will be Australia's flagship lunar rover, which they affectionately call "Roo-ver," which I just love," said Gemer.

Lunar Outpost's next MAPP is targeted for launch the spring 2026. Using science instruments developed by NASA and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU APL), the rover will investigate a magnetic anomaly that has gone unexplained for hundreds of years.

"So those missions will be going, [but] we want to do bigger things, better things, more collaborative, robotic missions. We really want to be the foundational infrastructure on the moon," Gemer told collectSPACE. "Mobility is one of those key enablers to building big and exciting things like a permanent human presence on the moon. So that's why we set out to be the leaders in space mobility and I think that's what we've accomplished."

Similarly, Lego is a leader when it comes to inspiring the next generation as to what is possible.

"I bet most engineers started out as a kid playing with Lego," said Gemer. "We've got lots of great work to do with Lego, because it's one of those foundational, inspirational things for kids in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math). Tying that to space exploration, which is another one of those things everyone can connect with, it's just a really natural partnership."

Which brings it all back to Ari and Aiden and the Moon Rover Space Vehicle set.

"We built the MAPP rover, and then the resource collection rover. We are working our way up to the big one," said Gemer. "I just want them to enjoy building it."