While we have built a lot of props and software ourselves for our game we tried to use as much ready made stuff as possible. There has been enough work to just modify such things to our need and we barely made it all in time that doing everything from scratch would have resulted in much less feature rich systems.
One of the software component we use was partially used due to it's origin and real world usage over other similar options: the OpenMCT mission control framework. It's developed by NASA and used in many of their real space exploration missions!
Even if our data we display with it isn't real it's still quite cool to actually integrate something like that to our own systems. As we have heavily modified the look of it to better suit our need even if people would know the existence of the software they wouldn't necessary regognize it. It's still nice to have an opportunity to ude something that is actually space related in our makeshift spaceship.