Printed Apollo Mission Map poster held up in the workshop

Apollo Simulator Mission Map

I wanted the mission map, located under the desk’s lid, to be a guide for the entire mission. I settled on the idea that the top half would educate them on the different parts of spacecraft so they could visually understand what Houston was telling them to do. The bottom half would be a map of the entire mission with LEDs that lit up to show them where they are.

Artwork

I found some amazing historical Apollo-era graphics: the Saturn V, the Command & Service Module, the Lunar Module, and NASA’s mission profile chart. The originals had a lot of detail, so I edited them down to the bare essentials in Paint.NET.

Saturn V rocket cutaway diagram
Apollo Command and Service Module diagram
Apollo Lunar Module diagram
NASA Apollo moon landing mission profile chart
Original Apollo-era graphics (courtesy of NASA, public domain)

Layout

I built the full layout in Inkscape. I added my own labels to point out key equipment and mission steps that the kids would actually encounter during play. I then put a red or green dot where each LED would go for when I got to the wiring portion.

Printed Apollo Mission Map poster held up in the workshop

construction

After printing the poster, I punched out each red or green dot with a hole punch to make the LED holes. Then I mounted the poster to a layer of black foam board with spray adhesive. I cut a second foam board layer with an open area in the middle to hide the LEDs and wires, and glued it to the back.

I pushed the LEDs in from the back, hot glued them in place, and numbered each one so I could keep track of them during wiring.

Back of the Mission Map with LEDs hot glued in place and numbered

All 84 LEDs are wired as a matrix to reduce the number of wires running back to the panel. Planning this was challenging because the layout isn’t a grid. The LEDs follow the mission path, not neat rows and columns. Space behind the poster was also tight so I had to plan the rows and columns for the simplest wiring possible. I came up with a decent color-coded scheme, wired it up, and hot glued everything down so closing the lid wouldn’t disturb the wiring in the future.

Back of the Mission Map with the LED matrix wired up

Once the wiring was complete and the LEDs all tested good, I terminated the wires with pluggable terminal blocks. These will let me quickly disconnect the map so I can remove the panel or the map in the future if something needs to be fixed.

Overall, I’m really happy with how this turned out. The old school graphics mixed with discrete LEDs gives it a very retro look.

Finished Mission Map lit up under the desk lid above the control panels

One response to “Apollo Simulator Mission Map”

  1. Apollo Simulator Wiring – Project Bytes

    […] green connectors hanging off the bottom are for the Mission Map. The only items not complete in this picture are the audio controls in the bottom right. There are […]

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