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).

NASA’s presence at the 2016 South By Southwest Interactive Festival. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

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.