City

Lunar Space Station

A cheerful little moon base that landed right in the middle of the Artemis excitement.

Brick Rated Score

3.6/5

Set 60349 · 2022

Pieces500

Minifigs5

Year2022

Set number60349

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The verdict

This is one of those City sets where the finished thing is more charming than the build itself.

Those eight curved trans-light-blue windows are the whole personality of it, and once the roomy living pod is open and five astronauts are floating around inside, it looks like a proper NASA outpost. I'll be straight with you though: the sticker count and the original price are the two things that keep it from being an easy yes. Get it for a kid who is space-mad, or for the parts, and you'll be happy.

Best for: space-obsessed kids and City players who want a bright, play-first moon base

The full review

What it is

The Lunar Space Station arrived in 2022 right as NASA's Artemis program had everyone looking back at the Moon, and you can feel that timing in every part of it. This is City's take on a lunar outpost, 500 pieces of white and trans-light-blue that come together into a station with a science lab, a botany bay, sleeping quarters, and a little capsule that docks and undocks. What got me is those eight curved windows. They wrap the main living pod in this soft blue glow, and because the roof lifts away the whole interior is wide open, roomy enough that even adult hands can move the figures around without knocking things over. For a set aimed squarely at play, that openness is exactly right.

The catch

I do have to be honest about the two things builders kept raising. First, the stickers. There are thirteen of them, and a few (the three on the canopy especially) are the kind that fight you the whole way, prone to static and impossible to nudge straight once they touch. What stings is that several of the solar panels are printed, so LEGO clearly could have printed more and chose not to. Second, the price. At its 79.99 dollar launch RRP this worked out to around sixteen cents a part, which is roughly double what you'd hope for, and the plain interior and half-hour build don't do much to argue the case. If you catch it retired and discounted, the maths gets a lot friendlier.

Who it's for

So who should get it? If there's a kid in your life who lives and breathes rockets and astronauts, this is a joy, big windows, easy access, five figures to crew it, and a capsule to fly home. City collectors building out the 2022 space wave will want it too, since it anchors that subtheme nicely. If you're an adult builder chasing clever engineering or a display centerpiece, though, I'd point you elsewhere, because this is a play set first and it doesn't pretend otherwise. Buy it for the fun and the figures, not for a challenge.

The parts story

What the build is actually like, and the pieces worth knowing about.

Building this is a relaxed evening, not a project. Most reviewers had it done in a little over half an hour, and the trickiest moments are the stickers rather than any actual technique. It's straightforward SNOT and plate work, the kind of build that's genuinely nice to hand to a younger builder because they can follow it and feel capable the whole way through. The one section that slows you down is getting those curved canopy pieces and their stickers seated cleanly.

For parts, the trans-light-blue curved windows are the headline. Eight of them in one box is a generous haul of a glass element that's brilliant for spaceship and dome MOCs. The rotating solar panels and the docking mechanism give you some useful functional bits, and I really liked that LEGO went brick-built for the astronaut life-support backpacks instead of a single molded piece, so you get one slim PLSS pack and one chunkier EMU-inspired one. Add five astronaut minifigures with cameras, a wrench, a drill, helmets and little plants, and it's a solid figure-and-window donor even if the price-per-part was never its strong suit.

Fun facts

01The set was designed to echo NASA's Artemis Moon program, right down to two different astronaut backpack styles based on real lightweight and full EMU life-support systems.
02Rather than use an existing molded life-support pack, the designers built both PLSS backpacks out of standard bricks, a deliberate choice you can spot in the finished figures.
03It launched on March 1, 2022 at 79.99 dollars and has since retired, now settling around the high-60s dollar range for a sealed copy.
04One of the fiddliest stickers is a Classic Space logo on the maintenance hatch, a quiet wink back to LEGO's original 1970s space line.