Italian Astronaut Lands on the Moon, Just a Human-in-the-Loop Run

Any space mission is inherently dangerous, but the ones that require humans to touch down on another celestial body take the definition of danger to an entirely new level.

And that danger mostly comes not from the hardware we use for such missions, but generally from us human beings. According to a paper published back in 2014 by scientists from several universities around the globe, “human error contributes to about 80% of vehicular (aerospace, maritime, automotive, railroad) casualties and accidents.”

One of the best ways to prevent that from happening in space exploration is training, of course. At the time of writing, although the Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule already exist, NASA doesn’t even have the full specs of the SpaceX lander that will put humans on the Moon, so there’s no actual training going on there.

But that isn’t stopping the European Space Agency (ESA) from practicing landings on the Moon, as part of its Human-In-the-Loop Flight Vehicle Engineering study, meant to investigate “the added performance benefit offered by human oversight of lunar landings to improve robustness and reliability of the flight system.”

For the project, an Italian astronaut named Roberto Vittori ran several landing scenarios, trying to establish a "preliminary design and the preliminary requirements for human lunar landing." For his task, the astronaut used something called DLR Robotic Motion Simulator, in fact, nothing more than a robot arm fitted with a capsule at one end and a virtual flight deck.

You can see how it all went in the video attached below.