National Air and Space Museum
Flight Director

UX Design Lead

Location: Washington D.C.

Time: 2017

Client: Smithsonian Institute

Overview

For their “Moving Beyond Earth” exhibit hall, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum contracted a new interactive that would allow visitors to simulate the real-time decisionmaking skills of a NASA flight director, as well as learn about the famed STS-49 Space Shuttle mission, in which the real-life flight director, Al Pennington, was required to make a series of critical decisions to save the mission from failure.

The exhibit was originally going to merely walk visitors through the critical events of the STS-49 mission, however, upon iteration, a light objective-based game was conceived to increase engagement and “raise the stakes.”

Gameplay

To keep the focus of the player on the mission objectives as much as possible, and reduce the need for extensive tutorials, the objective was kept to simply maintaining as much agreement between you and Al Pennington as possible when it came to “Go” or “No Go” decisions for 5 major mission steps that actually occurred on STS-49. The number of decisions you made that aligned with Pennington’s real-life historical decisions would decide your success at the end of the game.

Mission specialists would feed you “updates” over a predetermined window of time, and based on their recommendations, which were sometimes at odds, you had the responsibility to make the final go/no-go decision, all within that time window. The game would validate you for making the same decision as Pennington, and explain any divergence you might make. In this way, visitors were kept on their toes, but were also learning concepts and facts about a real-life Space Shuttle mission.

(c) 2024 Joseph Donovan