This is Matt. You rarely see Matt. If you have ever caught a glimpse of him, it was likely during one of his brief "surfacing" moments: perhaps while he was using the staff room microwave or heading toward the back hallway. You might have noticed the Space Center shirt and wondered who he was, but you probably left the question unanswered, wary of interrupting his focus despite his disarming smile and generally friendly aura.
Today, I’m pulling back the curtain to reveal a little-known corner of the Space Center that is off-limits to volunteers and rarely visited by staff. I call it Matt’s World.
Last week, I happened upon Matt in the Staff Room. We exchanged a friendly greeting and caught up on the latest news. He mentioned he was working on a new dial-and-switch panel for one of the simulators.
"Here?" I asked, surprised. He nodded. "Where is this workshop? I know the Space Center inside and out, and I’ve never seen a workshop." I kept my voice casual; Matt leads a quiet life of electronic solitude and doesn't always appreciate a hard interrogation.
"You really want to know?" he responded, seemingly surprised that anyone would be interested in his tucked-away workspace. He gestured toward the door with a slight tilt of his head.
He led me to a nondescript gray door near the guest bathrooms—the one with the warning signs. As he pushed it open, he revealed the inner sanctum. It was a cinder-block fortress housing the Space Center’s massive air-handling units and furnaces. Shelves lined the walls, acting as a graveyard for the "land of forgotten trinkets"—props, circuit boards, and gadgets that had served their purpose years ago and were now retired to the shadows.
"I’m over here," Matt spoke, his voice barely above a whisper, as if he didn't want to wake the sleeping machinery. We rounded a corner, and there I saw it: the beating heart of Matt’s World.
The Artisan of the Console
His workstation was an island of organized chaos amidst the dust of the furnace room. On the bench sat a massive, skeletal panel, its face awaiting transformation into the bridge of a starship.
Matt’s hands moved with the steady precision of a surgeon. He was currently deep into the "wiring phase," a complex labyrinth of multicolored threads connecting heavy toggle switches to analog meters and digital displays.
"It’s not just about making it work," he explained. "It’s about making it look real."
Matt's masterpieces are works of art in the simulators. When a visitor flips a master switch, the panels hum to life. Their dials pulse with color. The LEDs provide crisp, futuristic lighting that makes the panels look like million-dollar pieces of aerospace engineering. To the kids flying missions in the simulators, they are pieces of a starship; to Matt, they are a labor of love and logic.
The Two Lives of Matt
Despite his mastery of hardware, this is actually Matt’s "side quest." By day, he works from the quiet of his home as a professional programmer—the "real job" that pays the bills. But his heart clearly enjoys the tactile click of a physical switch just as much as a clean line of code.
Off to the side of his desk, resting on compartments of diodes, sat a lonely chicken pot pie, still in its box, waiting for its turn in the microwave. It was a humble lunch for a man who spent his hours building the future.
Family life also weaves through the Space Center’s halls. Matt is married to Tabitha, the Center’s head of staff training and development. While Tabitha is busy shaping the human element of the center, Matt is in the basement shaping the mechanical one. Between their high-tech careers and their time at the Center, they’re also busy raising a young preschool-aged daughter—perhaps a future commander or engineer in the making.
I left Matt to his LEDs and his cold pot pie, closing the gray door behind me. The next time you see a flickering light on a simulator console or a dial that reacts perfectly to a crewmember's touch, remember the man in the cinder-block fortress.
Dave and Team are Busy at Work on the Starbase
