How long it takes, what order it runs in, and how to teach it.

Identity first. A trainee who says “I am a Marstronaut in Training” will carry that self-concept to graduation, and it reframes sleep, study habits and conflict resolution as training rather than chores. Nothing else in the program works until this lands.

This is the health-literacy floor, and it is the phase a Chief Medical Officer would sign off on. All eight National Health Education Standards are reachable here through mission scenarios — from bone density and sleep cycles up to community advocacy. Ground School is also the safest place in the program to fail, so it is where you teach trainees that a wrong first attempt is data, not a verdict.

The spacesuit is the best anatomy teacher ever built: every one of its twelve systems exists because a human body needs something the outside cannot supply. Trainees who could not name an organ system last month can now argue about redundancy in a thermal loop — and then map all twelve back onto themselves.

This is where “why do I need to know this?” gets its answer: because if the fuel calculation is wrong, the crew does not come home. All eight Standards for Mathematical Practice are exercised in mission planning, and every numerical question here has a consequence attached to it.

A mission needs welders, dietitians, radiation techs, logisticians and communicators, not only astronauts — and so does every hospital and every employer in the trainee’s own county. Sixty roles are mapped, each with a real education path, so a trainee who will never leave Earth still leaves this phase with a next step they can actually take.

Mission 1 is the proof that the badges were real. Eight rocket systems, eight required badges — propulsion needs chemistry, navigation needs math, life support needs biology, crew selection needs civics. A trainee cannot build past a gap in their own learning, which makes the gap visible without a coach having to name it.

Thirty-two weeks in a sealed can with the same five people is the original social-emotional stress test, and the six crisis events are each chosen because they have an exact Earth parallel: food poisoning maps to post-hurricane food safety, the radiation storm maps to sun exposure, the psychological crisis maps to recognising depression in a friend. Every resolved event produces an Earth Dispatch — the Share It writing, and the single best formative assessment in the program.

The surface phase is where the program stops being about space. Trainees allocate scarce resources, write the colony’s rules, argue treaty law and the ethics of who gets to go — and then run a real IDEAS project in their own community: Identify, Design, Implement, Engage, Assess. Victor Glover’s “We Are All Astronauts” framing is what keeps the whole thing tethered to Earth.

Every mission ends in a debrief, and the debrief is where the learning is fixed. This session converts twelve weeks of activity into a portfolio a trainee can show an employer, an admissions office or a scholarship committee — and it names who is coming back as an Ambassador or a Group Leader.