A hand-sewn creation by an 8-year-old

Unlike most spacecraft equipment, Rise was not designed by an aerospace engineer. It was created and hand-sewn by Lucas Ye, an eight-year-old space enthusiast from California.

His design beat out 2,600 entries from 50 countries in a global design challenge hosted by NASA in collaboration with Freelancer.com. The Artemis II crew, including Commander Reid Wiseman, personally selected Lucas's creation.

Continuing a historic tradition

The tradition of using mascots as Zero Gravity Indicators (ZGI) dates back to 1961, when Yuri Gagarin took a small doll aboard Vostok 1. Since then, characters such as Baby Yoda and Snoopy have floated through space to mark the moment astronauts become weightless.

Rise joins this legacy, carrying the symbolic and practical purpose of notifying the crew of zero gravity during their mission.

Design inspired by space history

Rise is more than a cute companion. The design pays tribute to the iconic Earthrise photograph taken during Apollo 8. The plush features a white body and a hat depicting Earth, with a brim decorated with galaxies and rockets. Mission specialist Christina Koch remarked that the mascot reflects the mission's ethos. "It is a mission that sort of mirrors our own," she said during the reveal at Kennedy Space Center.

Inside Rise sits a micro SD card containing the names of all participants in the design challenge, symbolically taking thousands of people along on this lunar journey.

From a child's bedroom to lunar orbit

Lucas Ye not only designed Rise but also personally built the plush. The eight-year-old from Mountain View has spent his childhood fascinated by the stars, and now, his creation will orbit the Moon.

Trisha Epp, Director of Innovation at Freelancer, emphasised the significance of the project: "Your design is literally going to space, which is not a sentence most people get to say. It's a beautiful example of crowdsourcing solutions to NASA's trickiest problems."