Training at EAC for Mass Effect: Andromeda

ESA’s centre in Cologne, Germany, welcomed six European celebrities of the gaming world to put their gaming skills to the test on real astronaut training. The budding astronauts go by such names as Squeezie, from France, Sep from the PietSmiet German collective, SciFun, from Poland, Jane of the Outside Xbox collective, TheGrefg from Spain, and Steffan Powell from the BBC, UK. Here with ESA astronauts Luca Parmitano and Matthias Maurer.

The six reporters filmed and documented themselves piloting a simulated Soyuz spacecraft, making a ‘spacewalk’ in ESA’s pool and submitting to tilt tables, rotating chairs and vertical treadmills at the German aerospace centre’s ‘envihab’ facility. Not all the challenges were strenuous: the YouTubers and reporters were treated to space food developed for European astronauts.