The NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander has made headlines as the mastermind behind the Star Trek-inspired command center room that he supposedly used while leading the Army's Intelligence and Security Command. However, while the room is true, Gen. Alexander wasn't the person behind the room, even if he was all too pleased to use it.
According to the Washington Post, the facility at Fort Belvoir Va., which was the creation site of a Hollywood set designer from Gen. Alexander's colleague Ellen Nakashima in 1998. Alexander took over in 2001 after the room had already been put in place.
However, this isn't to say that anyone who set foot in the room, Gen. Alexander included, didn't revel in the futuristic command center's features. For example, the site included automatic doors that made a distinctive "wooshing" sound when opening or closing, according to the Post.
Joel Harding, a retired Army officer who has been in the room several times described the space in a 2010 interview saying it had eight wide screens, a graphics processor designed in consultation with Disney, and a stainless steel captain's chair.
"It was always called the Captain Kirk chair," he said. "The whole thing was Star Trek, Star Trek to the max."
Keith Alexander was the senior intelligence officer at Centcom at the time. "he had nothing to do with creating the center," said Harding, who was information operations officer on the Joint Staff at the time.
Many others who are familiar with the space say that members of congress and other important visitors almost always want to sit in the captain's chair at least once to pretend he or she was their favorite captain from the series, be it Kirk or Patrick Stewart's Jean-Luc Picard.
While Gen. Keith Alexander is the one using the room today, he is not the man behind the design. However, it must be nice to walk onto a room modeled after the deck of Gene Rodenberry's flagship diplomacy vessel when it comes to doing some real-world work in that field.
