The ISS in all it’s glory!
Ok, I’ll come clean: I didn’t build the International Space Station (ISS) out of LEGO to get my barber to come to BrickCon. Sorry all, clickbait totally debunked. But the fact is, he did come to the con to see the build, and I think it’s fantastic that my MOC engaged people outside my typical LEGO circle! Jeff is one example of many awesome friends and family who came by to support me.
Jeff the barber – Shows up to support his client, what a Stand up fella!
So, what this article is really about is sharing the process to get from a mere twinkle of an idea in my eye to a real-life motorized and lit-up 8.5-foot-wide minifigure scale model of the International Space Station, in an… ahem… “crisp” 1.5 years.
I’ll walk you through the major elements of the build and my process in this article, but I should be clear up front that this won’t all be in chronological order. There was so much complexity and winding and wandering of my path over the year and a half that I will instead focus the story into a few big chunks of content:
Getting started
Logistics challenges
Development of the MOC
Displaying the build at BrickCon 2025
1 – Getting Going
Alllllllrighty then! Where did I start my process? It was a pretty simple situation: I wanted to build a very big MOC with motion and effects like my old Hells Angels movie build.
The goal: Go BigGer than This Build.
I’m honestly not sure what made me think of the ISS. Perhaps it was the big news cycle regarding Boeing’s Starliner? Regardless of the source, the earworm got in there, and I started sketching out ideas for an ISS-related project.
My first thought on the overall form of the build was to return to the theater “build in a box” style of Hells Angels. This would involve building a big old box with decorative exterior details on the front-facing side, and a covered top, with some sort of backdrop. There would be an ISS segment at minifig scale or a scaled-down model within. My preference is always to attempt minifig scale as the minifig is my favorite element—their expressiveness and character make me happy. So here’s the first serious concept below.
Mocking things up in MS PainT!
You can see that at this scale, I could only attempt a small segment of the ISS, to reasonably expect to build a box around it. I liked some aspects a lot, like the moving Boeing Starliner capsule and decorative pillars that looked like the NASA Kennedy assembly building—both very fun. But deep in my heart of hearts, I had a nagging feeling that tackling only a portion of the ISS was going to be disappointing. I doggedly pursued the idea through some concept work in Stud.io… and looked at how to include some of the NASA rocket LEGO sets within the corner towers as a neat Easter egg, but it still felt like a potential disappointment.
As you can see below, another concept I had worked on was creating a mosaic backdrop with glowing stars. This would have been pretty neat, I think, but I left it alone for a while when I decided this concept wasn’t the direction I wanted to go. You’ll hear more below about my thoughts on a mosaic later in the process, too.
Playing in STudio
All that said, the zoomed-in plan to only fit part of the ISS just wasn’t working for me. Back to the showers it was!
In a moment of hopeful optimism, I measured the size of a full minifig-scale ISS and realized, to my surprise, that I could fit it into my garage… albeit barely. That was quite the exciting moment, and frankly, I don’t think I looked back after that point—I was really going to build the whole station! From that point on, the question I continuously returned to was, “How do I make this work?”
At the beginning of the process, one unforeseen challenge was that the ISS has always been a fluid configuration over time—it was initially built up slowly and steadily, then additional elements have been added, substituted, or modified to reach the configuration we see today. So which version would I build?
You might be surprised that I didn’t simply model the most current configuration. I chose the configuration from around 2020, before new additional solar panels and the new Russian Nauka module were added. This reduced the weight of the rotating segments and avoided the need for complex rigging to support the Russian segment Nauka at the bottom of the stack. (So, how many of you sharp-eyed NASA history buff readers noticed the choice before I said anything?)
2 – Logistical Challenges
While knowing it could technically fit in my garage was a positive… I knew right away that this build would still be huge and difficult to work around, and I had to get pretty creative at times to make space and practical arrangements to reach the finished product. One of the more offbeat solutions I implemented in my garage was, of all things, a metal shower-curtain rod (back to the showers, indeed). I supported this with hooks I installed in the ceiling. Now I had a great platform to support in-work elements.
My Brother’s Father in law helped attach the Bar segments with bolts.
Transport was another obvious concern. After difficult MOC transport experiences in the past, I immediately envisioned sub-assemblies that would be more manageable and assembled into the final build at the convention hall. Everything needs to fit into the Jeep, so I always had that in mind.
Another challenge due to the huge size was how I’d support the build for display. This MOC needed something substantial. At first, I thought perhaps resting it on floor-mounted stands would suffice, but initial prototyping led me to believe stands would be too visually distracting to viewers. I started to sketch up concepts for hanging the build from a frame.
I thought for the longest time I would use wood to build the frame as I have experience crafting various wood elements. But later on, I was chatting with some pals from Portland (during Bricks Cascade 2025) and they suggested I look into “Unistrut” which is a very robust system of steel beams and attachment hardware, among many other options. My brother, who works in a test lab, was kind enough to walk me through a McMaster-Carr tutorial on which actual parts I could order for the frame and fasteners, etc. The other major element of the frame was that I wanted to use simple wood feet made of 2x8s and plywood to stabilize the frame so it couldn’t tip forward or backward. This yielded a fun day out on the patio, cutting wood, and another couple of sessions later, painting the wood black (a friend helped with the painting as well).
All that said, I still chuckle to myself about the fact that I built a gigantic, heavy steel-and-wood frame to hold my LEGO MOC… Who knew this is how MOCcing would end up someday!
3 – Development of the MOC
So let’s talk about how the major elements of the MOC came together.
Following my typical process, I sketched and sketched and felt out all the aspects of the build from the very beginning, then throughout the whole process. You’ve already seen a few sketches above of specific components, so here’s a sampling of the many other sketches I used throughout the process.
I also used CorelDraw to help measure the relative scale and size in studs of each individual element as I went: grab a screenshot of the subject matter, scale it so ten pixels equals one stud length, and then you’re able to draw lines and boxes over the various bits to measure them.
Vector Graphics for the Scaling/Measurement win!!
Something I also like to do early is figure out “what will move and how.” In a build this big, motion tends to be very challenging and needs to be incorporated from the get-go. So I researched the station to get a sense of what moves in real life and sketched out my own proposed subset to make sure I included some real pizzaz—nothing captures the eye like a good motorized function after all!
This ended up being the solar panels that rotate continuously, a little train car that runs the length of the truss, and large heat radiators that rotate partly, then reverse, and finally repeat.
Figuring out the motions I’d include. The left cutaways are initial ideas on how to Move the train car
Also, early on, I needed to get a sense of the major elements and how they connect in real life, as well as sufficient reference imagery to understand what everything looks like from all angles. So I bought Hayne’s book “International Space Station: Owners Workshop Manual” and watched various YouTube videos and pulled up maybe a zillion or so images online for reference. NASA even released a neat 3D model you can download and open up in the Windows “3D Viewer” program. Ultimately, I mainly used the still images for scale, and the 3D model to understand connections and shapes and to fill in the blanks where images weren’t available.
This model was incredibly helpful to figure out various shapes and connections that are hard to see in pictures!
The MOC has several major component assemblies, which I will walk through in the upcoming segment. I worked them in parallel, often putting one down and picking up another when I hit a creative or technical block. Each posed its own challenges and delivered incredibly rewarding results when finished. You know how it is—it feels so good to see a MOC come together looking like the source material!
And next up, I’ll go through the major elements of the build. First up are the solar panels.
Solar Panels
The solar Panels generate all the power for the ISS.
The solar panels posed many challenges for my build. They are among the station’s most iconic elements and needed to present an eye-catching, accurate look, so I couldn’t just hand-wave it.
For the main structural element that aligns with the station truss and holds the solar panels, I started by making up a pretty beefy structural core. This took a couple of iterations, but was generally a big honkin’ Technic brick beam. Finally, I had to add the decorative surface elements to make this thing look real. I wanted to keep weight down, but ultimately let that requirement slide a bit to ensure I liked the look.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of compromises, like avoiding greebling the surfaces of the sides the solar panels are attached to. I was particularly happy with the look of the electrical cabling and the structural truss elements I faked up. Lots of neat greebles to geek out on!
To hold the solar panels, I tried a very simplistic grid of Technic axles as the frame, but that was far too floppy. Next, I tried plates turned sideways, and that was pretty rigid. I stuck with that for a while, but as BrickCon approached, I decided it wasn’t rigid enough and ended up building with two stud-wide plates instead.
For the solar panels themselves, I cut cardboard segments as placeholders and attached them with simple Technic connectors. I honestly couldn’t think of anything better to do that would be as light and rigid, despite many friends’ great ideas. So… in the end, I bought some metal spray paint and went to town making these look like fancy electricity-generating hardware.
When they had that fine metallic sheen, a friend and I hand-drew the white grid using white paint markers. That was… a lot. Hours of drawing, annoying, careful ruler lines, shaking paint markers to keep the paint flowing, then clogging up, etc. Woof. But when it was done… boy, it looked good!
Then I dove in and started working on the biggest challenge of the solar panels: the rotation mechanism. It’s a lot of weight and a tiny torque arm, so the poor LEGO motors would need to provide a hefty amount of torque. The non-ideal reality of building giant panels would make the task more difficult with some expected droopiness and misbalance. This was a long process of trial and error, but ultimately, I got it spinning in decent order. So the motion is a bit rough, but I am incredibly happy to report it made it through all of BrickCon!
Ok that’s it for the solar panels, next up, the truss.
Truss
For the main ISS truss segment, I… get ready for a shocker… had to go big again! This is the central core of the whole build, and depending on how many wires I wanted to hang the station from, I knew this would have to carry a lot of load, some from the solar panels at the ends and some from the pressurized habitation module stack. I decided early on to go all out with Technic bricks locked across the side with Technic liftarms.
Next up, the backbone of the station.
This needed to be an incredibly stiff and strong beam that not only carried the load I mentioned above, but also had a built-in train car traversing its top. If that wasn’t enough, it had to have motors mounted on the ends to rotate the solar panels and motors built into the bottom to rotate the heat radiators. Oof, that’s a lot to squeeze in! I also decided to incorporate the LEGO Mindstorms controller brick into the bottom of the truss to control all this insanity. Building it into the truss ensured everything was clean, streamlined, and accurate to the real station shaping.
As for shaping, I went through two major iterations to achieve the hexagonal cross-section and angles that looked close enough to reality. First, I tried a Technic solution that was more rigid, but it was oddly difficult to attach plates to the exterior of this due to its large size. In the end, I used click hinges to achieve the angles. The complexity of the requirements meant I took my sweet time feeling my way through various aspects and iterating as needed.
The final step, as usual, was to add the decorative exterior elements. You’d think there are enough pictures online to know what everything looks like, but I can tell you it was challenging to sort out every detail to include. There were many occasions of poor lighting and or bad-angle images that slowed me down. But I persevered, and voila, see below how it came together in images.
Other things you may have spied in the images above include the struts connecting the truss to the pressurized modules (which are purely decorative in my build), the heat radiators and their mechanism under the truss, the storage platforms and other equipment hanging off the ends of the truss, and the little train car – i.e. the mobile base transporter/mobile servicing system with the Canadarm 2.
Alrighty, that’s it for the truss. Next up, the pressurized modules.
Pressurized Modules Stack
The pressurized module stack is just as iconic as the other major elements above. This is the portion of the space station where the astronauts and cosmonauts live and work in a pressurized air-filled set of compartments. This is basically a bunch of cylinders stacked on one another, with a few sticking off the sides. Sounds simple enough, right? WRONG!
Here’s where all the people go.
The modules are all different—some are cantilevered off the sides, they all have tons of exterior detailing, and there’s the little matter of attaching the whole stack to the truss and also hanging it from the ceiling to ensure there are two paths for the load. I decided to develop a reasonably round design with eight segments to make the cylinder, with a core that can attach to a central Technic beam. I first prototyped the rounded design in Stud.io to make sure I could achieve a reasonably round look and attach it to a central beam as I envisioned.
With some success on that front, I transitioned to building the modules with real bricks (and ordering a zillion bowed slopes). During the process, a major challenge was attaching all the modules that stick out from the sides. I could use Technic bricks to pin them in place or Technic axles to hold them on with friction. At first, this seemed pretty reasonable and my test cases held up fine, but later the exterior detailing added a ton of weight. To avoid the side modules drooping, I had to ultimately hold up the other ends with fishing wire from the main support frame (which I’ll describe later).
One fun detail of the pressurized modules is that I had finished the entire Japanese section, called Kibo, at some mid-point of the MOC, and realized I could finally take at least a portion of the build to conventions like BrickCan to prove to people that yes, I, Doug Hughes, still build LEGO! 🙂 This was rewarding as I got to display a chunk of finished product to help build back my depleted reserves of effort to finish the MOC.
Well alrighty, that’s the main LEGO portions of the build—phew, what a ton of work! I’m exhausted just digging up all the pictures, ha! So next up, let’s talk about how to hang up a gigantic LEGO ISS.
Rigging
Next up, after finishing all of the sub-components, was hanging the build from the frame and getting the various cable and string lengths right so everything is positioned perfectly. I had a coworker/friend swing by, and this was invaluable as I’ve found that holding various assemblies in place and hanging them is definitely a two-person job. Then he also assisted in tying some fishing cable knots with his old climbing rope skills, since I don’t know one end of a knot from the other.
Now… things were looking pretty exciting, the LEGO part of the build was hung in position, and I could finally see what it looked like in full. I can tell ya that was a pretty rewarding moment!
My next step was to sort out the black backdrop so it looked clean and sort of like it’s in space. This consisted of a PVC frame and black curtains hung on the frame and placed on the floor. Getting the PVC frame set up was a fairly straightforward effort of sketching modifications to a frame I built years ago for a Time Isles collab and cutting the many PVC sections to length. Then I assembled the PVC frame and moved on to the curtains, which simply needed a few snips in the hanging loop so I could get them slid onto the frame and around the support posts. The final touch was to place the floor curtain and step back to view the glorious display.
Ok, one side note on something I didn’t end up doing: the backdrop mosaic. Given the gargantuan scale of the build, a full mosaic backdrop would have cost a fortune, and it would have taken more time and effort to work out the logistics. So I think I properly prioritized building the main ISS elements first, and ultimately gave up on the mosaic. You can see I mocked one up based on a pretty amazing photograph of the Earth.
What could have been!!
As nice as that looks, I think it would also have been a more visually distracting background behind the station and would have taken away from the focus on the main display… so no biggie!
Now that everything was hung and the backdrop was ready, the final step was to install some lights.
Lights
Lighting was the last thing I installed to complete the piece that would be on display. This was sort of scabbed on, even though I knew the whole time I wanted to incorporate lighting. I had so many other challenges on my hands earlier, and I figured that, with all the inner spaces, I’d be able to place the battery boxes and wiring relatively easily… and I was right for once. I’m glad to say that adding the lights went relatively quickly, and I am quite happy with how they look.
Adding lights so this baby shines in the night.
At this point, the build was 100% complete: all the LEGO, backdrop, and lights were in place, and I was ready to take photographs and video. Photography of such a gigantic build, which could just barely fit in my garage, involved a bit of gymnastics to get my camera and body in a position to see it all in one frame, and there were silly details like the corner of a table was in frame because I literally had nowhere else to put it.
So like any LEGO photographer, I carried on and used GIMP to edit out any unseemly details like the hanging cables, the aforementioned table, and any other blemishes, which left a pretty pure black background and my shining lit up station in its full glory. (Queue heavenly “aaaaaaaaaa” noise.) When I saw the result of the edit, I was in shock. I was so happy to say the image looked exactly as I hoped. What a relief and an exciting moment to be able to show the world what took me one and a half years to complete!
Doug for Scale!
After getting the main picture edited, I also made a few edits adding various logos and other bits and bobs, I’ll share a fun one below.
We got slogans and patches baby!
And for funsies, of course I had to make a video showing the motions and explaining it all! So here’s my YouTube video embedded here for you to see.
Bam! It’s built, there’s a backdrop, it’s hung up, it’s lit up, and I have pictures and video. That covers everything to have a complete build. Now, it’s time to roll this out to the world and share it at BrickCon!
4 – The BrickCon Experience
I’ve told you all about the MOC and the whole setup for hanging it and making it look good… now comes the most exciting part: actually displaying the build at a con! I hilariously hoped at one point that I’d make it to BrickCon 2024 with the ISS, but I quickly realized that was a pipe dream. So for a long while, I knew BrickCon 2025 was the target to go for. Luckily, I had a lot of time and paced myself reasonably well. But wouldn’t you know it, the days, weeks, months slip by quite quickly when you have a job this big, and it was still a bit closer than I’d like.
Anyway, as BrickCon approached, I got my brother to swing by, and we packed up the ISS in the old gigantic wooden crate I built for my Hells Angels shipping to Chicago. Plenty of room, honestly, some decent wasted space, so it was a relatively easy packing job. I purposely didn’t pack in any steel or other elements which would have added a lot of weight, so the crate would be much easier to handle. That allowed my wife and me to lift the crate into the car alone the night before the show. I was able to cram everything else, including the frame and backdrop frame, plugs, cords, tools, and extra supplies of all sorts, in every little nook and cranny of the Jeep; it was a close call, but it all fit.
On the Thursday (first day) of BrickCon, I drove it over, and with my pals Larry and Patrick and some others, we were able to get the crate and all the gear out of the car and into the hall. I went at a somewhat plodding but steady pace, and over the course of Thursday and part of Friday, the setup slowly took place, with much, much help from many friends around me. I just don’t have enough hands to do many of the tasks of hanging things and holding things up temporarily, etc., on my own. Thank goodness for the amazing LEGO community I have around me here!
I purposefully tapped out of being a Theme Coordinator and skipped playing any games this year to ensure my setup process was as stress-free as possible… though there were a few stressful moments even still (including when my home printer failed me and wouldn’t cooperate so I had to go to a local print shop to make a couple of small posters to help explain the display). All in all, I can’t complain since it was a heck of a lot easier than the old Hells Angels MOC was to set up, which was a pleasant surprise. I was able to still spend lots of fun quality time with all my AFOL pals at the con, at the various assemblies, for every meal, and at night having drinks at local establishments. Everyone I hung out with made the con better and better; it’s one of my all-time favorite pastimes in life.
As for the public days, I mentioned it at the very beginning of this article, that I had a lot of family and friends come by, and between them and the extremely kind and interested public, the days flew by just chatting away about the build and the ISS. I did get a couple of excellent tours around the hall because of family and friends whom I walked through as the local guide, which was a great way for me to see all the builds that had been going up while I was so furiously concentrating on my own setup. So that was very satisfying.
The most epic thing I experienced over the whole weekend was, of course, on Sunday, when, at the end of the con, the staff gathered everyone for the final assembly and handed out the big awards. When they got to Best in Show and my name popped up on the screen, I sort of blinked and looked around to test whether I was still experiencing reality, and sounds sort of faded into the distance and I finally jumped up (a bit shaky to be honest) and jogged up to the podium with the biggest smile of my life on my face.
Like I said, I was a little out of body for a minute there, so my memory may not be trustworthy, but I believe the staff said it was a close vote, perhaps within a single vote between me and the runner-up. So boy, am I a lucky guy to have been the one to win it! It was a truly special experience, and I really appreciate everyone who felt my build was worthy. I can tell you it would not have been an easy vote for me—there were some really brilliant builds at BrickCon this year that all could have just as easily taken the top prize.
Mind 100% Blown!
Ok, so what was left, you ask? Just to cut the cords, toss the bricks in the crate, and roll out right? Ha! Tear down wasn’t nearly as arduous as set up for some reason (it never is)—perhaps I do cut a lot of corners, but I can tell you it still wasn’t fast. The plan was to have everything carefully situated so that at the next con I would have some clue how to get the thing back together, and that takes some care.
But luckily, I had my wife and two AFOL pals, Yoni and Josh, right there helping me for an hour and a half straight, and we got it all finally put away and stowed for transport (luckily this time into two cars, which made it easier). Finally, after a crazy LEGO whirlwind weekend, I drove straight to the hockey rink and played my rec league game. If it weren’t for my wife and friends, I’d never have made it in time, just a truly fantastic day!
I needed a little hockey to work off all the food and drink from the weekend 😉
Well, now you’ve heard the long and winding tale of my LEGO International Space Station. I told a lot of people that I built it because I never got the LEGO set of the ISS… and perhaps that was lurking in my mind, so hopefully that sort of inspiration strikes some of you awesome readers too!
Do you have a set that you never got a chance to buy, and then decided to make a MOC of it instead?! Let us know in the comments, and I’d also love to hear any good NASA or space stories too. Thanks for reading all!
Do you want to help BrickNerd continue publishing articles like this one? Become a top patron like Marc & Liz Puleo, Paige Mueller, Rob Klingberg from Brickstuff, John & Joshua Hanlon from Beyond the Brick, Megan Lum, Andy Price, Lukas Kurth from StoneWars, Wayne Tyler, Dan Church, and Roxanne Baxter to show your support, get early access, exclusive swag and more.
Leave a Reply