After the journalists handed their phones to Apple staffers to be taped up with camera-blockings stickers, the vans shuttled the group to Stage 15. (The Sony complex is also home to HBO's Insecure and Showtime's Ray Donovan. Apple may have a near-trillion-dollar market cap, but it still leases soundstages like everyone else in Hollywood.) Dryness maintained, we walked into the control room of NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center circa 1969.
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Apollo 11: Mission Out of Control Mission Control, as it's more commonly known, was painstakingly refurbished by NASA in its original Houston location and reopened to the public earlier this year. The Hollywood version in front of us, taking up almost 8,000 square feet of Stage 15, is its utter replica, from the soft packs of Kools strewn on long tiers of desks to the million-buttoned BOOSTER consoles that tracked the Saturn V rockets powering the Apollo spacecraft into orbit. Rotary phones. Horn-rimmed glasses. Even the ceiling tiles have been custom-made to match the ones in Houston.Such millimeter-perfect verisimilitude is to be expected. After all, we're standing in a Ronald D. Moore project. A veteran of multiple Star Trek series and creator of numerous other shows, including the beloved mid-'00s space opera Battlestar Galactica, Moore is known for paradigm-busting genre television , creating worlds that are meticulously designed and populated by fully realized characters. This newest project, a series called , imagines how our society might look today had the space race never ended. It's at once rueful and optimistic, a journey that undoes decades of declining ambition by imagining how an alternate past spawns a new future.