LEGO Ideas and CUUSOO

Tintin Moon Rocket

The red-and-white checkered rocket every Tintin fan already pictures on a shelf.

Brick Rated Score

4.2/5

Set 21367 · 2026

Pieces1,283

Minifigs5

Year2026

Set number21367

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The verdict

This is the very first official LEGO Tintin set, and it goes big with a 49cm version of the moon rocket from Herge's early-1950s comics.

It's built as a proper display piece, so know going in that it's about the silhouette and the minifigs, not play features or a hollow interior you can pose crews inside. If you grew up with Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon, this one hits a nostalgia nerve that no spec sheet can capture. If you just want a clever technical build, the checkered sphere is more patient work than fireworks.

Best for: Grown-up Tintin fans who want that checkered rocket standing tall on a shelf

The full review

What it is

Here's the headline that matters before anything else: this is the first official LEGO® set based on Tintin, full stop. Herge's boy reporter has been around since 1929, the moon comics landed in the early 1950s (a good fifteen years before any real lunar mission), and somehow it took until 2026 for the bricks to catch up. The star of the show is that instantly readable red-and-white checkered rocket, standing 49cm tall, based right down to the fins and the round porthole on Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon. If you know the books, you already know exactly what this looks like finished, and that recognition is most of the appeal. It came through LEGO Ideas from Portuguese fan designer Alexis Dos Santos, who started the whole thing trying to help a coworker who couldn't find a Tintin rocket build she liked, which is a lovely origin for something that hit 10,000 supporter votes.

The catch

Now for the honest bit, because there are real caveats. At 1,283 pieces for $159.99 the price-per-piece is on the steep side, and that's because a chunk of what you're paying for is the licence and the minifigs, not raw part count. This is a display model in the truest sense. There's no usable volume inside the hull, no play features, and when you close the two halves of the cone up, none of the figures actually fit in the cockpit. Reviewers were split on the assembly too. It's a complex shape and some found parts of it fiddly and repetitive rather than satisfying. The sticker sheet is small but the stickers are tough plastic that reviewers suggest lifting with fine tweezers, and more than one wished LEGO had added a sticker for the little door on the checkerboard. None of this is a dealbreaker, but it's the difference between loving this set and merely liking it.

Who it's for

So who should grab it. If you have any warmth at all for Tintin, this is close to a must-own, because it's the first one and it captures the rocket beautifully on a shelf. The five minifigs (Tintin, Captain Haddock, Professor Calculus, and the bumbling Thomson and Thompson) plus Snowy the dog are genuinely charming, all kitted out in the orange moon suits. If you're coming purely for a rewarding technical puzzle or a set with play value for kids, temper your expectations, because the fun here is nostalgia and display, not mechanisms. I'd happily give it space on a shelf, and I suspect a lot of people will buy it for the figures alone and never regret it.

The parts story

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

The build is really an exercise in shaping a curved, six-sided sphere and getting the checkerboard to wrap cleanly around it. There's a Technic-based core that gives the rocket its structure, using angled connectors (some at 120 degrees) with different colours called out in the instructions to keep you from getting lost, which you'll appreciate. From there the checkered shell goes on panel by panel, and this is the stretch that divides people. It's careful, repetitive placement rather than a run of clever surprises, so it rewards patience over pace. The payoff section is the top: you pop a panel off the cone to reveal a small control room you can pose a minifig inside, echoing the moment the crew first sees Earth from space, and there's a sweet Easter egg where the star map inside nods to the designer's own birth constellation.

On parts, the piece that fans will talk about is Tintin's brand new quiff hair mold in bright light orange, which finally captures that front tuft the comic is famous for. Snowy is a new element too, dual-molded into his little orange spacesuit with an oxygen tank on his back (the catch being he's stuck orange, no white version). All five human figures wear new spacesuit prints, with Tintin and Captain Haddock getting radio accessories. The value math is honest: at roughly twelve and a half cents per piece this isn't a bulk-parts bargain, and a lot of the shell is repeated bricks, so you're paying for the licence, the new molds, and six characters you can't get anywhere else, not for a pile of rare useful elements.

Fun facts

01This is the first official LEGO Tintin set ever made, arriving nearly a century after Herge created the character in 1929.
02The comics it's based on, Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon, were published in the early 1950s, imagining a lunar landing more than fifteen years before Apollo 11 actually did it.
03It came from LEGO Ideas via Portuguese fan designer Alexis Dos Santos, who started building it to help a coworker who couldn't find a Tintin rocket design she liked, and it went on to hit 10,000 supporter votes.
04The star map hidden in the control room is a nod to the fan designer's own birth constellation, an Easter egg tucked inside a set already full of them.