The Heroes and Legends attraction at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex is a salute to NASA’s space explorers.

The attraction allows visitors to experience early space missions — Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs.

Falcon’s Creative Group, a themed-entertainment design company based in Orlando, worked on the project. In a recently-released video, the group gives a behind-the-scenes look at the process of making the attraction.

The 15-minute-long clip featured interviews from Falcon’s team members, including creative manager Stephen Ricker.

“Coming up with the who’s your hero and what is a hero, that theme kind of resonated in all of us because these people were just that, they were people,” Ricker said. “We really wanted to reflect that and have the audience start asking that question to themselves, ‘Who’s a hero to me?’”

Falcon’s team used technology to bring various artifacts to life. One example is the hologram for the Gemini 9 capsule experience. To recreate the astronaut outside of the capsule, the team used motion capture and 3D animation.


Gemini capsule at Heroes and Legends at Kennedy Space Center. (Falcon's/YouTube)

Team members also talked about the challenges the editorial team faced when trying to create the stories for the pods that visitors get to experience.

“We spent a tremendous amount of time researching the stories of the astronauts, the chronological order of all the footage that we acquired from NASA, what it meant and when it happened to make sure everything was as historically as accurate as it possibly could be,” said media editor Jesse Allen.

Heroes and Legends featuring the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame opened to the public in 2016. The multi-million dollar enhancement includes a 4D multisensory theater, space artifacts, multimedia presentations and displays for inductees in the Astronaut Hall of Fame.

Watch the behind-the-scene video below: