Next summer, ESA's first Automated Transfer Vehicle ATV will bring food, water and equipment to the Space Station ISS. It's docking will be fully automatic, with no possibility for the astronauts to perform a manual docking - though they can push a ""red button"" in case they want to stop the docking process and the ATV to retract.
The decisive full-scale tests of the automated docking between the ATV and the ISS are being passed since August at Europeís largest ship hull test facility, west of Paris.
Inside a 600-metre long building, a 120-tonne mobile platform controlled with millimetre precision, enables the continuous tridimensional approach between the two space vehicles, from a range of several hundred metres to within docking contact conditions.
This ESA TV Exchange documents one of these docking tests, including soundbites by ESA Project Manager John Ellwood, and former ESA astronaut Jean-François Clervoy.

""ATV concludes rendezvous and docking trials"" (A-Roll dur: 5:20)
A-Roll
00:00:40 The Automated Transfer Vehicle, 20 tons and the size of a London double-decker bus, is the largest spacecraft ever built in Europe. The un-manned vehicle will be used to ferry cargo to the International Space Station and to raise its orbit.
00:00:58 The first flight model, the ""Jules Vernes"" due to be launched next year, is currently undergoing final integration and space environmental tests at ESA's Noordwijk facility in the Netherlands. Its crucial navigation systems are simultaneously being qualified at an exceptional test centre in France.
00:01:16 The facility 100 km west of Paris, the only one of its kind in the world, belongs to the country's Defence procurement agency, DGA. There, the ATV programme has been validating the rendezvous and docking technologies and software, crucial given the human safety requirements.
00 :01 :36 Clip Jean-François Clervoy ñ ATV senior advisor astronaut, ESA