‘Magnificent desolation.’ That’s how Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the Moon, described the landscape of our nearest cosmic neighbour, back in 1969.
I couldn’t agree more. There’s no vegetation in sight, let alone insects or birds – just colourless rocks, stones, gravel and dust. The sky above is completely dark, but a blindingly bright light, low above the razor-sharp horizon, casts long, black shadows.
It would be fascinating to hear Aldrin’s thoughts on how realistic the scenery is. After all, it’s not the Moon (of course) – it’s the LUNA Analog Facility, a European training area for future Moon-bound astronauts.
Located on the grounds of the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) in Cologne, the facility is a joint program of DLR and the European Space Agency (ESA).
Although a similar facility is under construction in Texas, in the US, LUNA is currently “unique in the world,” says project manager and space engineer Andrea Casini.
Erected next to the European Astronaut Centre, LUNA is, essentially, a 700m2 (7,500 square foot) windowless hall, filled with 900 tonnes of makeshift lunar dust, known as regolith.
But this isn’t just a fancy sandbox for adults who want to play astronaut, says Casini. “We do everything we can to approximate reality as closely as possible, in a controlled way,” he says.
Almost sixty years after the legendary Apollo missions, NASA is again preparing for boots on the Moon. Despite being plagued by delays, the Artemis program is definitely underway; the first crewed landing is expected before the decade is out.
“But this time, it’s not about a quick visit to plant a flag,” says Casini. “Artemis is the first step toward longer stays on the Moon, comparable to astronaut visits to the International Space Station (ISS).”
Moreover, he adds, while Apollo was a fast, risky, Cold War-driven endeavour, Artemis follows a more secure approach.
Part of that approach is extensive training, as well as technology development and testing in Moon-like environments. “After all, if your instrument doesn’t survive LUNA, it’s not fit for the Moon,” says Casini.
While regular astronaut training is still yet to commence, plenty of technology tests have already been carried out.
For example, engineers have tested the Handheld Universal Lunar Camera (HULC), which has been developed by ESA and NASA’s Artemis imagery team to capture high-definition imagery on the Moon – and designed to withstand its harsh environment.
And, last year, German astronaut Matthias Maurer entered the LUNA facility wearing a new carbon-fibre, sensor-laden Moon suit. Designed by Norwegian space company Nåva Space, it’s the first commercially available spacesuit in Europe.
You don’t have to be a European astronaut to use the facility.
Indeed, Japanese scientists have already worked in LUNA, together with Luxembourg-based space company ispace-Europe, to test Moon-bound equipment in the simulated environment.
(ispace-Europe was one of LUNA’s first commercial clients; it built the small TENACIOUS rover for the Japanese lunar lander Resilience, which unfortunately crashed on the Moon in June 2025).
Weird circumstances
A huge window in the facility looks down over the training area below, a boxed-in lunar landscape like something out of Stanley Kubrick’s science fiction classic 2001: A Space Odyssey.
There’s a bank of simulated regolith you can touch – the powdery black grains are small enough to fill in my fingerprints.
“It’s basaltic sand that has been ground down industrially to match the properties of the real stuff,” says Judith Ewald, LUNA’s operations manager.
“Part of it is quarried from a volcanic field in the German Eifel mountains, but we also use material from the Nördlinger Ries impact crater in Bavaria.”
The dust is an important consideration when designing lunar equipment as the fine powder can get everywhere (polluting, for example, Moon suits – as it did with those of the Apollo astronauts).
So, simulating the real regolith as closely as possible is an important part of testing the locomotion of rovers, or the way in which the tiny grains might work their way into delicate science instruments.
Down below, two small figures wearing special suits and helmets walk slowly between stones and boulders – there’s even a large crater with steep walls, as well as a number of smaller depressions.
As Ewald explains, one part of the training area is about 3m (9.8ft) deep and contains various artefacts – and even a small sub-surface tunnel that mimics those on the Moon that were carved out by lava billions of years ago.
In this Deep Floor Area, technicians evaluate the performance of seismic equipment and ground-penetrating radar instruments, and it can also be used to test sampling and drilling activities.
The idea is to provide astronauts with as much hands-on experience as possible in preparation for a real trip to the Moon.
“Training is absolutely necessary, and extremely useful,” says former ESA astronaut André Kuipers, who has been to the ISS twice.
“I’ve benefited most from simulations in which you worked with real equipment. Such hands-on training provides a form of ‘muscle memory’ that you still remember years later. Training for the Moon is essential, and luckily, many of its weird circumstances can be simulated here on Earth.”
On the surface
In a changing room downstairs, I’m made to don a white coverall, a hairnet, shoe covers and a face mask, as if I’m about to enter an industrial clean room.
You want the test area to remain as Moon-like as possible, after all, without any ‘terrestrial’ dust. And vice versa: bringing the powdery regolith simulant back into the attached office spaces would be a real nuisance.
Casini opens the large roller door that provides access to the LUNA training area. This is as close as I’ll ever get to actually stepping on the Moon.
Of the two figures in the test area, one is Oliver Küchemann, a DLR software engineer. He and his colleague are carrying out tests with a small four-wheeled lunar rover. Rover tests typically check how they behave on the dusty and accidented terrain.
Some are even equipped with instruments to detect the presence of sub-surface ice or water molecules in rocks – experiments that will certainly take place on the real Moon.
Küchemann operates a console with a joystick and a screen showing the view from a small camera on the craft’s front. Navigating the rover around rocks and pits takes a lot of skill – especially given all the dark shadows.
“Of course, we can’t simulate everything here,” says Casini. “To gain experience with much larger rovers, or with much longer excursions, field trips remain absolutely necessary.”
For example, geology training – to recognise different types of rock – is often offered out in the open – in Norway, for instance, or on the volcanic island of Lanzarote.
“LUNA is essential,” Casini explains, “but just like in football, we are one player in a big team where every member has its own unique quality.”
If the laboratory experiments and field excursions are the other players, the game is preparing for crewed lunar missions.
In one corner of the training area, partially hidden by one of the black walls, is a full-scale mock-up of the uncrewed Argonaut lunar lander being developed by ESA and Thales Alenia Space.
One day, Argonaut may deliver cargo and provide power for Artemis missions, so it makes sense to allow astronauts to acquaint themselves with the craft here in LUNA.
Unfortunately, the two commercial spacecraft that NASA has chosen to actually take people to the surface of the Moon – SpaceX’s Starship and Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 2 – are too large to fit in the Cologne facility.
Training with these spacecraft is likely to happen at the facilities of these companies.
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Eternal light
At the time of writing, the Artemis program is still very much in flux. The uncrewed Artemis I flight around the Moon was successfully carried out in November 2022.
The world watched as Artemis II, which lifted off on 1 April 2026, took astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen further than humans have ever travelled from Earth, on a loop around the Moon.
The crew splashed down off the coast of San Diego, in the US, on 10 April.
In February 2026, NASA administrator Jared Isaacman announced that Artemis III will conduct rendezvous and docking tests in low-Earth orbit in 2027.
Only with Artemis IV will people finally return to the Moon – no sooner than 2028, but probably later, as many aspects of the mission still have to be developed and tested.
One thing’s for sure, though: the first crewed lunar landing since Apollo 17 will take place relatively close to the Moon’s south pole.
That’s the preferred location for a future Moon base, as deep craters with permanently shadowed floors contain valuable ice deposits, while high ‘peaks of eternal light’ – high-altitude regions where the Sun almost never sets – are ideal to generate electricity with photovoltaic cells.
It’s one of the “weird conditions” of the Moon Kuipers referred to, and it all has to do with the low altitude of the Sun as seen from the south polar region of the Moon.
This special circumstance is simulated in LUNA with a giant spotlight on one of the walls. Even though the spotlight isn’t nearly as bright as the real Sun, it creates long, utterly black shadows that make this high-contrast landscape so disorienting.
It’s another hurdle astronauts will have to navigate during their missions.
But, according to Ewald, LUNA’s Sun simulator will soon be replaced by a moveable lamp, to replicate more lighting conditions. It’s just one of the planned improvements for the facility.
After all, on the real Moon, astronauts will experience continually changing shadows, albeit at a very slow pace. This is because the Moon rotates around its axis only once every four weeks, making it harder for astronauts to recognise what they’re seeing.
Another future addition will be the installation of a controllable ramp to test various operations on steeper terrain, up to slopes of 50 degrees.
And ‘mixed reality’ goggles will provide astronauts with a view across vast stretches of virtual lunar landscape, replacing the black walls of the hall.
What's next?
Just outside the main LUNA building sits a shipping container that’s been converted into a 28m2 (301 square foot) space habitat called FLEXhab.
Yes, it will be many years before the Artemis program can give rise to a lunar base with rotating crews (like on the ISS), but FLEXhab offers a taste of things to come. Currently, the campervan-like interior is fit for a crew of four.
Similar isolation studies by various space agencies have aimed to prepare astronauts for prolonged visits to the ISS, or even for space trips to Mars.
In 2010–2011, for example, the Russian Academy of Sciences carried out the MARS-500 study, in which six crew members were sealed off for 520 days in a facility no larger than your average house.
And, in 2023, NASA’s Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (CHAPEA) began a series of missions to simulate Mars, locking four crew members in their ‘Mars Dune Alpha’ habitat that simulates the conditions of the Red Planet. They stayed in there for 378 days.
Again and again in space missions, psychological issues turned out to pose the greatest challenge: people start to get on each other’s nerves, tension builds, communication issues develop.
And research has also shown that disruption to circadian rhythms plus the effects of radiation and microgravity can all worsen cognitive health.
FLEXhab can’t remove all of these hazards. But its solution? Cosy, Danish-designed interiors. “It looks much more friendly than the interior of the ISS, which is basically a messy laboratory environment,” says Casini.
While the first isolation studies in FLEXhab (likely to last weeks rather than months) have yet to begin, the facility currently hosts supporting experiments.
In February 2026, for example, scientists from the Technical University Munich tested a so-called ‘photobioreactor’, in which micro-algae remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and put back oxygen (mimicking what trees do on Earth).
Such life support systems will be indispensable in future Moon missions.
In the near future, astronauts may be able to experiment with growing their own food in a small greenhouse (called EDEN, which stands for the ‘evolution and design of environmentally-closed nutrition sources), using recycled urine to water the plants.
EDEN, FLEXhab and LUNA will all be connected by corridors, making it easier to simulate longer stays on the Moon, including excursions on the barren surface.
Yet there’s still work to be done.
When you think of astronauts on the Moon, you probably imagine those slow hops and somersaults in the low lunar gravity – the same ones the world saw on grainy video broadcasts of the Apollo landings.
But, when everything weighs only one-sixth as it does on Earth, how can you simulate these conditions in an Earth-based facility?
According to astronaut Kuipers, training for zero-gravity conditions traditionally happens in huge swimming pools, where buoyancy provides a sense of weightlessness.
By increasing the weight of your spacesuit – which doubles as a diving suit – you can simulate lunar gravity.
It’s why the European Astronaut Centre in Cologne has its own 10m (33ft)-deep ‘Neutral Buoyancy Facility’, as it’s officially called. The pool was used to investigate moonwalk procedures in a French project called Moondive.
But in a swimming pool, your body movements are severely impacted by the mass of the surrounding water, and of course there’s no Moon dust to tread on.
That’s why LUNA engineers, together with technicians from Space Applications Services, are building a gravity-offloading system called Puppeteer. A small prototype has already been installed in one corner of the LUNA training area.
Like puppets on a string, astronauts will be attached on long cables that glide across rails on the ceiling. The cables are essentially huge springs, mimicking the feeling of bouncing around in a low-gravity environment.
The final Puppeteer system, covering the full expanse of the training area, is expected to be completed in the summer of 2027, says Ewald.
Luckily, leaving LUNA doesn’t require boarding a tiny space capsule and re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. Even after extensive training sessions, a real trip to the Moon will always be a tremendously challenging endeavour.
But there’s one other thing LUNA is missing, and that’s the view of our own planet. When Buzz Aldrin reflected on his lunar experiences, he said he “could see our shining blue planet Earth poised in the darkness of space.”
While this could surely be projected behind the glowing light of LUNA’s false Sun, perhaps it’s a view best reserved for those who eventually return to the real Moon’s magnificently desolate surface.
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