In a milestone for robotic aviation, the Navy's most valued drone has successfully simulated landing on an aircraft carrier deck for the first time. That deceptively simple maneuver, performed over the weekend, is a sign that Navy might really be able to operate drones off its aircraft carriers, helping the U.S. keep its robotic edge.

On Saturday, as shown in the video above, the Dorito-shaped X-7B descended from the skies onto a mock carrier deck on dry land at the Navy's Patuxent River testbed. It was a test flight, but one unlike the previous ones conducted by the demonstrator aircraft, it was a crucial one. The robot's tailhook caught the kind of cable, called an MK-7 arresting gear, that the Navy's actual Top Gun pilots have to catch all the time when they touch down on flattops at sea. Not bad for a robot, especially one that doesn't even have a tail.

The implications of the successful test are big. Landing on a moving target like an aircraft carrier is one of the hardest maneuvers in aviation. Navy pilots call it "the Trap" and talk about a "Pucker Factor" when they pull it off. The Navy wants its semi-autonomous Unmanned Carrier-Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike drone, the follow-on to the X-47B, to do all that at the click of a mouse. Other nations might be scrambling to build drones and blunt the U.S.' robotic advantage; none of them has a drone that can do anything close to this.

Nor does the United States -- yet. Getting a robot to make the Trap on the deck of a carrier at sea is an enormous challenge. Imagine a jet-powered aircraft descending extremely rapidly onto a surface that's pitching and rolling through tempestuous waters, all while steaming through the seas. Imagine doing so at night.

If you miss the Trap, lots of bad things can happen. Your plane goes careening into the water. You smash into other planes. You kill the flight crew on the deck. You damage the ship. You are badly wounded or dead.

A robot won't die, of course. But if it can't get hit the Trap, the utility of the Navy's most important drone program is called into question. There's no way the Navy will put flying robots on its decks -- especially armed ones -- that can't hit the Trap. And if it can, then the Navy will have made perhaps the most significant advancement in unmanned aviation since the Air Force strapped missiles to a Predator. What is true for Young Jeezy is true for the X-47B, the UCLASS program and the future of Navy drones: it's Trap or Die.

"Landing an unmanned aircraft on an aircraft carrier will be the greatest singular accomplishment for the UCAS demonstration and will serve as the culmination of over a decade of Navy unmanned carrier integration work," the X-47B's program manager, Capt. Jaime Engdahl, said in a statement Monday announcing that the robot hit the Trap. "Shore-based arrested landing testing here at NAS [Naval Air Station] Patuxent River is our final check that the X-47B can meet that objective."

Emphasis on shore-based. Later this month comes an even bigger test: the X-47B will head to the USS George H.W. Bush to take off and land at sea for the first time. (Danger Room will be reporting from the deck of the Bush when it happens.) As much as the Navy celebrates the X-47B's arrested landing on shore, its institutional pucker factor will be at work when the robot has to do it at sea. There's a reason that the statement today says the X-47B will be "catapulting from the carrier deck and potentially completing landings aboard" the Bush; emphasis added.

Lots can go wrong when trying to land on a carrier, and it's understandable that the Navy would hedge on the X-47B hitting the Trap its first time out at sea. But on dry land, at least, the Navy is confident its most important drone is off to a good start.