Rice University and NASA Johnson Space Center launched an open-source simulator for developing robots that could work inside spacecraft and space habitats. The iMETRO Dynamic Simulation, described as the world’s first open-source dynamic simulation environment for intravehicular space robotics, was debuted at the 2026 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Vienna. The project was funded by NASA, Rice and the National Science Foundation. The simulator is a digital twin of NASA Johnson’s iMETRO facility, a physical test bed with full-scale mockups of future space vehicles and lunar habitats, along with custom robotic platforms. The goal is to let researchers remotely create, test and validate robotic software before moving it to NASA’s physical test bed. The project tackles the problem of making the most of astronauts’ time during long-duration spaceflight, as crew members spend about a third of their time on routine maintenance work. Robots that can handle some of those tasks could free astronauts to focus more time on science and exploration. Developing those robots remains difficult because space habitats create manipulation challenges including low- and zero-gravity conditions.