Airbus is steering a Mars rover prototype with a modified Steam Deck.
At its Stevenage campus in the UK, Airbus showed documentarian Tom Scott its ExoMars rover test bed, letting him drive it with a Steam Deck rigged to run custom control software. Push forward and the rover rolls; press a bumper and the wheels swivel 90 degrees, letting it dodge rocks without needing a wide turning circle. It's not clear whether the unit is the LCD or OLED Steam Deck, but it looks like the standard model. The handheld isn't flight hardware. It's a stand-in controller for engineers developing the rover's autonomous navigation system.
The real work here is the navigation software, not the gamepad standing in for it. Using off-the-shelf gaming hardware to test and demo robotics controls is a shortcut aerospace teams have leaned on for years, because building bespoke input devices is expensive and gamepads already do this job well: precise, low-latency directional control. Airbus is racing toward a 2030 launch for the Rosalind Franklin rover, part of what the company calls more than 20 years of work, and it still has landing, thermal, and propulsion systems to finish before any of that matters.
Somewhere, a Valve engineer is quietly adding "space exploration" to the Steam Deck's list of unintended day jobs.