Meet the California 8-year-old whose plushie is going on Artemis II

A California native is going to space on Artemis II — and it’s not a human.

RISE, a plushie designed by 8-year-old Lucas Ye, is joining four astronauts in space aboard Artemis II, which is set to launch Wednesday at 6:24 p.m. ET, marking the first human return mission to the moon in over half a century.

“I was really proud and hyperactive,” the Mountain View-raised boy said in a video shared with the California Post, describing the inspiration for his plushie. “I like space, I like rockets, I like NASA, I like the solar system. I like studying about space.”

The round, white plush toy sports a hat adorned with the Earth and a brim patterned with galaxies and rockets.

The design draws inspiration from the iconic “Earthrise” photograph captured during Apollo 8 — an image that mission specialist Christina Koch said reflects the very spirit of Artemis II, according to the organizers.

The Moon Mascot: NASA Artemis II ZGI Design Challenge was hosted on Freelancer on behalf of NASA. Freelancer, the world’s largest freelancing and crowdsourcing platform with over 87 million users, is among 25 companies awarded NASA’s Open Innovation Services 3 contract.

“On behalf of everyone at Freelancer, congratulations to the winner — what an incredible achievement. Your design is literally going to space, which is not a sentence most people get to say,” said Trisha Epp, Director of Innovation at Freelancer.

Ye’s design was among hundreds of submissions from around the world.

“My CGI is named RISE and is representing Earthrise. The cap is representing Earth in Earthrise. The white is representing the two past and future moon missions, and the constellation Orion represents Artemis II,” Ye described the plushie in his own words.

“The moon, which has the tiny footprint in the back, is representing the past Apollo missions. The footprint was made by Neil Armstrong from Apollo 11,” he went on to explain.

Ye is a space-obsessed 8-year-old who didn’t just design RISE — he also built the plush himself, even though the contest only required a design submission, according to freelancer.

“He’s a great talker and genuinely enthusiastic about the mission,” they said.

The other finalists in the NASA Artemis II ZGI Design Challenge showcased creativity from around the world. Entries included Anzhelika Iudakova’s “Big Steps of Little Octopus” from Finland, Daniela Colina’s “Corey the Explorer” from Peru, Johanna Beck’s “Creation Mythos” from McPherson, Kansas, and Oakville Trafalgar High School’s “Lepus the Moon Rabbit” from Canada.

NASA launched a global design challenge via Freelancer to create a Zero Gravity Indicator for Artemis II — a small plush that floats to signal when the crew reaches weightlessness. The tradition dates back to Yuri Gagarin’s Vostok 1 mission in 1961 and has featured everything from Snoopy on Artemis I to Baby Yoda on SpaceX Crew-1.

The contest drew more than 2,600 entries from over 50 countries, with the Artemis II crew — including commander Reid Wiseman — helping to select Lucas Ye’s winning design from a final shortlist of five.

A micro SD card containing the names of everyone who registered for the challenge is stored inside RISE for the flight — turning the plush into a tiny time capsule headed to space.

“The judging panel had a really tough time with this one. You’d open a submission, and it’d be from a student in Finland, or a science storyteller in Germany, or a child in Texas who clearly spent weeks getting every detail right,” Epp, who led the challenge and heads its NASA partnership programs, said. Every entry brought something personal to it — you could tell how much this meant to people. It was a privilege to see that kind of passion and creativity come through. “

The team selected for the Artemis II mission, beyond Ye’s plushie, NASA Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency mission specialist Jeremy Hansen.

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