Trip Tucker refers to Captain Jefferies, an engineer who worked on the NX Program in the 2140s who later helped design the NX-class. This name is an allusion to Walter M. Jefferies aka Matt Jefferies, who was the art director of Star Trek (1966) and designed the Enterprise, the D7-class Klingon battle cruiser, and many other ships. One episode required a tight work space for a scene, so Jeffries came up with an angled tube connected to a corridor and containing various junction boxes. When a later script made a reference to this structure, the writers simply called it a Jeffries tube after the man who came up with them. He died on July 21, 2003, two months after this episode first aired.
In the 602 Club there are paintings and patches of many of the spacecraft mentioned on Star Trek, including the DY-100-class, the Phoenix, the NX-Alpha and the USS Enterprise (XCV 330). There is an assignment patch of the Earth-Saturn probe, featuring Christopher, and astronauts O'Herlihy and Fontana, named after Michael O'Herlihy and D.C. Fontana, the director and writer of Tomorrow Is Yesterday (1967), the episode where it was mentioned. Michael Okuda later sent a copy of the patch to Fontana, which she reportedly appreciated greatly (O'Herlihy had died several years earlier).
Commodore Forest's role is somewhat similar to that of D.K."Deke" Slayton of the early manned space program at NASA. Slayton was one of the original "Mercury Seven" astronauts, and was the oldest of them, but he was removed from flight status because of an irregular heartbeat. He was then put in charge of flight assignments, which is part of Forest's duties when he was an Admiral. The parallels may end there. In 1975, at the age of 51, Slayton was cleared to fly and served as the docking module pilot of the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz test project.
This episode was directed by LeVar Burton, who played Geordi La Forge in Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987).
During A.G.'s test flight, Archer was the person in charge of communicating with him. This goes back to the days of the Mercury program. In those early days, every flight was a test flight in which they would try new things with what were essentially experimental vehicles, and among the greatest experts in the workings of these vehicles in flight were the astronauts. They also "spoke the same language", meaning that their communications would be far superior to that of non-astronauts. The astronaut in communications from the ground is referred to as "CapCom" (Capsule Communication or Capsule Commander).