Halle Berry, as NASA astronaut Jo Fowler, is seen inside the space shuttle in the Roland Emmerich film"Moonfall." More than a movie set, the scene was shot using a retired NASA simulator.
"It was great because there was so much detail you could film," the director told collectSPACE.com."Nobody can do that anymore, not even a good set decorator can do that anymore. It would just be too difficult."Members of NASA's STS-131 crew, including astronauts Stephanie Wilson, Alan Poindexter and Clay Anderson, train in the Guidance and Navigation Simulator at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston in January 2010.
Built out of the remaining parts from an early shuttle procedures simulator, the GNS was at first only used to test the software that would run on other simulators and the real orbiters. After the space shuttle Challenger tragedy in 1986, however, NASA upgraded the GNS to serve as a second static trainer with the computer-fed window displays needed to train astronauts.
When the shuttle program came to an end in 2011, NASA awarded the GNS to Wings of Dreams, an aviation museum that, at the time, had plans to expand its facilities at the Keystone Heights Airport in Starke, Florida. Unfortunately, the funding needed to display the GNS and other large space shuttle artifacts never materialized and with growing pressure from the airport to leave its property, the Wings of Dreams ended operations in late 2018.
"They also added a lot of 'set dressing' to the outside of the simulator, so it no longer looks like the GNS [when it was at NASA] — or, in person, an orbiter," said Jenkins.