360-degree virtual tour of the Space Shuttle Discovery flight deck

discoverycockpit.jpg

An excellent chance to gawk at history, before they box it up and stick it in a museum.

I've chosen to focus in on the controller joystick here, because of a funny experience I had over the 4th of July weekend. While visiting family in Kansas, my husband and I went to Kansas City's Science City museum. Science City has a "Land the Space Shuttle" flight simulator. The joystick control for that doesn't look like the one in the actual space shuttle. Instead, it's clearly repurposed from your average flight simulator video game console. What gave me that impression? Probably the pair of missile launch buttons that graced the center of the joystick. As my husband said, "You don't mess with the space shuttle."

Via Doug Kaye