People you know at the ASM, or can anyone make inquiries? I wouldn’t be surprised if someone on the film (McQuarrie?) drew inspiration from NASA hardware
Yeah, I just looked up curator’s emails on the museum’s website. I’ve been to a few talks there, so I did have some idea of which people to look for, and their staff bios list their specialties. One of the talks I went to was given by Owen Garriott, seen here at the very controls in question, so remembering which curators were involved with that talk was a good starting point.
So yes, it did help that 5 years ago I went to a lecture devoted to, more or less, talking about operating those controls.