AUSTIN, Texas—South By Southwest Interactive is currently in full swing, and in addition to hundreds of panel conversations, the festival also includes a giant trade-show floor full of attention-hungry startups. The floor is covered in a mélange of start-up-styled nonsense, and it ranged from intriguing (custom-molded earbuds) to awkward (a 3D food printer that was down due to Windows PC crashes) to creepy (an app-controlled plastic mask meant to be worn overnight for beautiful skin) to outright awful (a wobbling surfboard-like rig meant for standing desks that we almost immediately fell off of).

In short, this isn't a scene in which you'd expect to find established, beloved companies—you're more likely to find your Samsungs and Googles throwing parties or hosting dedicated venues around downtown Austin—which made the startup convention room's one exception to that rule seem all the more curious: NASA.

NASA's SXSWi presence looked a little like a county-fair setup, with a foam-board sign advertising real astronauts stopping by to speak, some giant models of NASA spacesuits and rockets, and some scaffolding-held signs about Mars aspirations and strides towards innovation. Of most interest to us was a single, nondescript cubicle at the edge of the staging, which contained a pair of HTC Vive headsets.

Virtual reality has been an important part of NASA's training regimen for years, thanks to massive, expensive rigs at their facilities, but the team at its Hybrid Reality and Advanced Operational Concepts Lab was on hand to confirm that consumer-grade VR like the Vive is now figuring into its operations—and they'd already built two amazing demos to prove it.

“Holy $#*%, I'm in the ISS!”

NASA engineer Matthew Noyes walked me through the company's Vive demos, which he confirmed were built in 3D using the Unreal Engine. After putting on the HTC Vive headset and grabbing a Vive wand controller, I was first transported to a facsimile of the International Space Station. This clearly wasn't a one-for-one recreation, in terms of the bulky equipment that you'd find on board the functioning, floating satellite, but its basic layout was intact, and it included things like a grounded spacesuit and a few computer terminals.

Like in other recent Vive demos we've played, the ISS simulator (which doesn't have an official name) offers a mix of free walking and "teleporting" so that users can warp from room to room once they run out of real-world walking space. Everything from grabbing objects to moving between rooms was mapped to the Vive wand's buttons in weird ways, but once I got over that mental block, I was able to pick objects up, throw them around, and manipulate stuff like a flashlight and a drill.

The ISS simulator's current implementation offers a single "training" module, which Noyes admitted needs some polishing, but I was able to crack open a toolbox, grab some screws, position them into holes in a wall, and drill them in to secure some ISS hardware. ("That's a Team Fortress 2 toolbox," Noyes admitted.) The demonstration was meant to show how careful astronauts need to be with things like small screws when performing maintenance, but this current version was more of a consumer-facing demo of the astronaut experience than a realistic training exercise.

Still, Noyes insisted that NASA astronauts who have grabbed and thrown things in the demo's super-basic zero-gravity physics engine say that it replicates what it's really like to tap stuff inside of the ISS and watch it float away. This experience felt intense in the demo when Noyes asked me to walk up to one wall in the virtual world, where he'd positioned real-world metal rails. I held the rail with one hand and then began hanging on while touching zero-gravity objects with the Vive controller. This is when the 12-year-old boy inside of me emerged unexpectedly and exclaimed, "holy shit, I'm in the ISS!"

From real lunar data to motion-tracked super-robots

The other demo seemed equally suited to Vive and Oculus play, as it required sitting in a cushiony chair with the headset on—but in NASA's case, it required real throttle-styled hardware for more immersion. Once I was in the chair and sporting a Vive, I found myself in a lunar rover parked right next to a frozen recreation of the original moon landing, complete with Buzz Aldrin stepping off Apollo 11 and Neil Armstrong shooting video.

I could accelerate, go into reverse, and steer with the throttle controller, and NASA was kind enough to drop giant, green balls onto the moon's surface to offer a suggested driving path around nearby craters and hills. "Astronauts say being on the moon makes it easy to lose track of where you are and want to see what's beyond the next hill," NASA software developer Aly Shehata said, and that feeling filled my entire being as I began racing across the moon. "This is all completely accurate mapped data straight from NASA," Shehata told me; not like I had any way of confirming, but, I mean, why would NASA's design team fake it?

In spite of my many months of Vive testing, Shehata was still able to surprise me with one facet of the hardware. After I'd cruised along the moon's surface for a minute, he encouraged me to look up, straight up, at the rest of the black universe above my head. "The stars will appear once your eyes adjust," he said, and sure enough, the bloom effect played out. Utter blackness turned into a wealth of stars, which Shehata said happens to be the same thing astronauts experience on the moon when they look up from its bright, sun- and Earth-lit surface.

Just typing about that facet of the demo is making me nearly tear up. I can barely handle the thought that today, I was closer to outer space than I'd ever been in my life. Even with issues like a missing real-time shadow/lighting system and some nausea from driving up and down virtual hills, I was absolutely blown away by the experience—and the same could be said for the ISS simulator, whose texture quality was the pits and whose simulation could have used more ISS-specific hardware inside of it.

After finishing both demos, I wondered if will we get to purchase them as eventual products for home VR kits like this month's Oculus Rift and next month's HTC Vive. NASA said they were "working" on a public release—and were toying with an ISS sim function which would allow VR users to watch real astronauts inside the station. However, no launch plans, let alone release dates, have been confirmed.

As for the future of consumer-grade VR within NASA, Noyes and project manager Frank Delgado said it was interesting to their research team both as an outreach product—something to blow Vive and Oculus owners' minds—and as a new tool for astronaut training. NASA had put astronauts into similarly functioning VR kits over ten years ago, he mentioned, but the simplicity of the Vive system's tracking stations could allow him to do even more cool stuff with just a little bit of ingenuity.

In particular, Noyes said, NASA's training centers put future astronauts into giant robots, which simulate some of the hardware work they have to do in space and even react to zero-gravity situations. "If we could daisy-chain a bunch of these dumb sensors," Noyes said, pointing at the Vive's tracking stations, "and have our robots equipped [with sensing nodules] to send their own location data over the span of a full, giant room, imagine what we could do." I asked if Noyes and NASA had worked with HTC and Valve on this daisy-chained proposal, and he said no, but that "these stations don't do that much, really," meaning he thought the team could pull something off.

We'll obviously have to wait and see what the Hybrid Reality and Advanced Operational Concepts Lab can pull off with a mix of their expensive, in-house rigs and hacked-together consumer products, but NASA was on hand at SXSW for one other reason: to find more people to help. "We're hiring," another NASA rep told me as I walked away, misty-eyed—and I nearly asked for a form to fill out.

This article has been updated with name corrections as per NASA's request. We regret the error.

Listing image by Sam Machkovech