He was thinking about history while most kids his age think about lunch.
A small stuffed toy with a baseball cap and a crown painted in the blues and greens of Earth is, as of this week, somewhere beyond our atmosphere, floating free in the cabin of a spacecraft headed toward the moon. It belongs, in a sense, to an eight-year-old boy from Mountain View, California, who beat out more than 2,600 other children for the honor of sending it there.
Lucas Ye is a second-grader and, by his own cheerful accounting, a devoted student of rockets, NASA, the solar system, and space in general. When NASA and the crowdsourcing platform Freelancer announced a global competition to design a zero-gravity indicator for the Artemis II mission, Lucas entered. He won. His creation — a smiley-faced plush toy named Rise — is now aboard the first crewed American lunar mission in more than half a century.
The purpose of a zero-gravity indicator is simple and a little wonderful: it hangs in the cabin, and when the spacecraft clears Earth's gravity and the toy begins to drift upward on its own, the crew knows they've reached weightlessness. Rise floated free sometime after Wednesday's launch, doing exactly what Lucas designed it to do.
The name Rise is a nod to Earthrise, the photograph taken by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders in 1968 — one of the most reproduced images in history, showing our planet suspended in the black void above the lunar surface. The toy's crown echoes that image, rendered in the familiar greens and blues. The baseball cap visor is decorated with stars. Other design elements pay tribute to the Apollo 11 moon landing of 1969. For an eight-year-old, Lucas was thinking in deep time.
Hours before the launch, a reporter asked Lucas how he felt. He stretched the words out like taffy: "Really, really, really, really, really, really, really surprised and very happy." Trisha Epp, director of innovation at Freelancer, put it more formally in a press release, but the sentiment was the same: "Your design is literally going to space, which is not a sentence most people get to say."
Rise joins a tradition that goes back to the earliest days of human spaceflight. Yuri Gagarin, the Soviet cosmonaut who became the first person in space in 1961, brought a small doll along for the ride. Reid Wiseman, who now commands Artemis II, carried a toy giraffe on a 2014 expedition to the International Space Station. There is something quietly human about this habit — the impulse, even among the most rigorously trained people on Earth, to bring something soft and small into the void.
The mission itself is historic on several fronts. Artemis II is NASA's first crewed flight toward the moon since Apollo 17 in December 1972 — nearly 54 years ago. The crew will not land on the lunar surface, but they are expected to travel farther from Earth than any humans ever have. The mission is also the first to carry a woman, astronaut Christina Koch, and a person of color, Victor Glover, beyond Earth's orbit. As of Thursday, the crew was preparing to leave that orbit behind.
If everything goes as planned, Rise will travel more than 250,000 miles out and back over the course of ten days. Lucas, who told CBS News Bay Area that he hopes to work at NASA or become an astrophysicist, will be watching. So will a lot of other people — some of them children who entered the same competition and lost, and who are perhaps already thinking about what they might design next time.
Notable Quotes
Really, really, really, really, really, really, really surprised and very happy.— Lucas Ye, eight-year-old designer of Rise, hours before the launch
Your design is literally going to space, which is not a sentence most people get to say.— Trisha Epp, director of innovation at Freelancer
The Hearth Conversation Another angle on the story
Why does a crewed spacecraft need a stuffed animal at all?
It's not strictly necessary — but it's not frivolous either. A floating object gives the crew an immediate, visual confirmation of weightlessness. No instrument readout, just a toy drifting upward.
And NASA ran a competition for a child to design it?
NASA and a crowdsourcing company called Freelancer opened it globally. Over 2,600 children entered. Lucas Ye, a second-grader from Mountain View, California, won.
What made his design stand out?
It's layered with meaning for an eight-year-old. The toy references the Earthrise photograph from 1968, the Apollo 11 landing in 1969. He named it Rise. He was thinking about history while most kids his age are thinking about lunch.
Is there something significant about this tradition of bringing soft objects into space?
It goes back to Gagarin in 1961. Reid Wiseman, who commands this very mission, brought a toy giraffe to the space station in 2014. There's something the engineers and the astronauts seem to understand — that a small human object matters in an inhuman environment.
What's the broader significance of Artemis II beyond the mascot?
It's the first time humans have headed toward the moon in nearly 54 years. The crew includes the first woman and first person of color to travel beyond Earth's orbit. They won't land, but they'll go farther from Earth than anyone in history.
And Lucas himself — does he understand the scale of what's happened?
Probably not fully. But he said he was really, really, really, really, really, really, really surprised. Seven 'really's. That might be the most honest response anyone gave to this mission.