People mostly like sci-fi, it's just that many times it's hard to separate possible from pure fiction. General film production is not very helpful, facts-wise, with rare exceptions. Eye candy sells well, so that's what we get.
There are also space themed on-line games, which are also quite popular and usually not very reality obsessed.
This games can also get very complex and technical, using all sorts of fictional technology and materials.
What about an open source game, using as real as possible physical engine, allowing users to add scriptable objects, which could then be used as such, or as components in other objects. Universe would be made upon known data about celestial objects, with their movement and interaction, sort of a virtual galactic solarium, which you could explore, err, not very fast
If object description is based on XML, it would be even neater. One could start with
Flight Gear, or with
OGRE, mix it with a bit of
QT, torrent under-carriage for a global database and
mysql for local.
Eclipse could be a binding tool, it has a lot of software modeling add-ons which could be used or modified. It should allow local server and connecting of servers to create a common universe, sort of a multiplayer player game with allowed client mods.
It would probably be much simpler, to make such a program single user, as simple as game programming goes, but i think it's nice to have someone around to share misery
Plugging popular message protocols into user interface would probably also not be impossible to do.
If such a game could be used as a simulator, it would be a very nice playground to show and experiment with ideas.
I think that Mars rover drivers use something close to this.