A Mini Moon Rover from the Toy Company That Created Transformers

The private museum of Takara Tomy, the Japanese toy company responsible for Transformers, Beyblade, and Zoids, is filled with playthings from Christmases past. In a lovingly curated room in the company's Tokyo headquarters, a miniature B-29 bomber, faintly flecked with rust, sits at the ready in a glass display case. A squad of Micronauts action figures seems to have warped in from the seventies. An R2-D2-esque Omnibot, the remote-controlled robot that I begged my parents to buy in 1985, looks ready to roll. In the near future, these toys are likely to be joined by a very different sort of gadget: a small, spherical moon rover named SORA-Q, which Takara Tomy designed for the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA.