Space agencies were early adopters of virtual reality before it was called XR. The NASA Johnson Space Center has used VR-based training since the 1990s — long before consumer headsets existed. What’s changed in the last few years is the quality of the hardware, the fidelity of the simulation environments, and the ability to combine real sensor data with rendered environments in ways that weren’t practical before.

Here’s where aerospace and space exploration actually use XR in 2026, beyond the marketing claims.

Astronaut Training for Extravehicular Activity

Training for EVA — spacewalks — is expensive and constrained. The main facility NASA uses is the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory at Johnson Space Center, a 6.2 million gallon pool where suited astronauts practice in near-weightless conditions. It works well but has limits: you can’t put the actual ISS equipment in the pool, scheduling access is competitive, and underwater training introduces hydrodynamic drag that doesn’t exist in vacuum.

VR supplements this in ways that are now well-established. Astronauts use VR to practice the cognitive sequence of EVA tasks — the order of handholds, the sequence of operations on a specific piece of equipment, the spatial relationship between modules — before getting anywhere near the pool. Collins Aerospace and Axiom Space both run VR training programmes that allow astronauts to walk through procedures hundreds of times at low cost.

Where VR training is genuinely superior to the pool is for tasks that require precise tool operation in a specific visual environment. In the pool, visibility is limited by water. In VR, you can see exactly what an astronaut would see in vacuum, with the correct lighting conditions (harsh direct sunlight, deep shadow, no atmosphere to scatter light).

Mission Planning and Situational Awareness

Mission Control has traditionally worked from 2D screens and numbers. XR is being used to build environments where mission controllers can visualise what’s happening spatially — where a spacecraft is relative to a target, what orientation a telescope is pointing, how debris proximity maps onto a satellite’s trajectory.

ESA’s ESOC in Darmstadt has integrated 3D mission visualisation tools into some operations. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has used immersive visualisation for planetary mission planning for years — the OnSight tool, developed for Mars mission operations, allows planetary scientists to explore terrain data from Curiosity and Perseverance in a VR environment, walking through the Martian landscape as if present. This changes how scientists select science targets and plan rover traverses because they can reason spatially rather than interpreting 2D imagery.

The outputs of these tools aren’t just more intuitive — they’re sometimes more accurate. Spatial reasoning in 3D environments surfaces problems with planned manoeuvres that aren’t obvious from spreadsheets and camera feeds.

Satellite Servicing and On-Orbit Operations

Satellite servicing is an emerging area where XR training has direct safety consequences. Several commercial missions have now demonstrated the ability to approach, capture, and service satellites on orbit — DARPA’s RSGS programme, Northrop Grumman’s MEV missions, Astroscale’s debris removal work. Each of these requires operators to control robotic systems at distances where light-speed delays make direct manual control impossible.

Training for these operations uses a combination of physical mockups and high-fidelity VR environments. Operators practice approach trajectories, robotic arm positioning, and contingency scenarios in simulation before the actual mission. The fidelity requirements here are high — the XR environment has to accurately represent the target satellite’s geometry, surface materials, and tumble rate. Digital twins built from photogrammetry and CAD data are increasingly used to create these training environments.

Launch Vehicle Assembly and Maintenance

Ground operations are a less glamorous but significant XR use case. Launch vehicle assembly is complex, sequential, and sensitive to error — a misassembled component on an Ariane 6 or a Falcon 9 can delay a mission by weeks or worse.

AR guidance for assembly tasks is being trialled by several launch vehicle manufacturers. The approach is similar to industrial AR maintenance tools: the technician wears a headset or uses a tablet, and overlaid instructions guide them through the assembly sequence step by step, with the current step highlighted in the physical workspace. Sensors can confirm that a fastener has been tightened to the correct torque before allowing progression to the next step.

ArianeGroup has published work on AR-assisted assembly for Ariane 6, and Rocket Lab has discussed mixed reality tooling for Electron production. The gains in these applications come from error reduction and training time, not necessarily speed — in launch vehicle assembly, getting it right matters more than getting it done quickly.

Spacecraft and Habitat Design

VR is used extensively during spacecraft design to review geometry and ergonomics before anything is built. NASA’s Orion capsule design process included extensive VR reviews where engineers walked through the cabin at 1:1 scale to identify ergonomic issues, reach constraints, and visibility problems that weren’t obvious from CAD renderings. This is now standard practice at most spacecraft manufacturers.

The next step is mixed reality design review — combining physical mockups with virtual overlays to compare design iterations without rebuilding physical props. Axiom Space has been doing this for their commercial space station modules, combining physical sections with virtual extensions to evaluate the spatial experience of future crew quarters.

Why This Sector Is a Good Fit

Aerospace is well-suited to XR adoption for a few reasons. The cost of physical training is high, the consequences of procedural errors are severe, and there’s a long history of simulation-based training in aviation that normalises the idea of practising in virtual environments. The integration of real mission data into XR environments is also more mature in aerospace than in many other sectors, because space agencies have been managing and visualising complex spatial data for decades.

The technology is still evolving — latency in robotic control environments, tracking accuracy in suited gloves, and the fidelity of tool interactions all have room to improve. But the use cases are real, deployed, and producing measurable results.