Japanese Astronaut Furukawa Builds LEGO Space Station

Japanese astronaut Satoshi Furukawa poses with the LEGO model of the International Space Station that he built on board the real space station.

CREDIT: NASA

It took more than 200 astronauts from 12 countries more than a dozen years to build the International Space Station (ISS).

Satoshi Furukawa, an astronaut from Japan, matched that feat in just about two hours and he did it all while aboard the orbiting outpost itself.

It helped that his space station was made out of LEGO.

"It was a great opportunity for me to have built the LEGO space station," Furukawa, a Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) flight engineer, said in an interview after he returned to Earth. "I enjoyed building it."

"The ISS was put together in space, piece by piece," said Furukawa. "It's very similar to how you put together LEGO bricks on Earth."