The Space Design Competitions (SDCs) are multi-faceted industry simulations. The competitions are rich in content and have a long history, starting with subcontractors who work at NASA. Although the task can look intimidating at first, you'll soon benefit from collaborating in a large team. This means that you only need to be willing to contribute, discuss, share, research, discuss again: your company of students will work together.  You are already an expert at living in a settlement on a planet (you live in a community on Planet Earth) - and your company will all learn about the off-Earth requirements as you take part.

This page provides resources explaining the competition. Read it to find out about the design decisions that your SDC company will need to make. This page helps you with the more complex engineering and business issues.

Your industry simulation SDC is set in the future, therefore this webpage often refers to fictional entities (invented by us, for the competition). OUR COMPETITION RESOURCES PAGE is not factual: any similarities with real events, places, or persons are purely coincidental.

The Setting

The SDC challenges are set in a fictional version of the solar system some time in the future where significant infrastructure has been built and living in space is not uncommon. To facilitate this, many companies exist to design new settlements and to provide services, both for construction and operation.

Prime contractors are large companies who will dedicate time and money to responding to a request for proposal. You will take the role of an employee in a design team working on one of these proposals.

The reason for this setting is to help give a sense of how large projects often work: with many ‘subcontractors’ being employed to offer expertise and services: despite being in space, no project exists in a vacuum! Prime contractors often employ hundreds of subcontractors on terrestrial projects. A selection of these services are made available to help you, as a prime contractor, to design a settlement that will fulfil the needs of its client.

That client is The Foundation Society, an international governmental collaboration to ensure the shared, peaceful, and safe development of outer space. They have commissioned a large number of expensive space settlements with significant industrial capacity that future developments can draw upon.

Running your company

The experience of working in the SDCs, often in a large ‘company’ made up of multiple departments, will be entirely new to many first-time competitors. The links to the right offer some guidance on what to expect from the SDCs, how your company works, and its top-level departments.

Carving your own path and strategy is often difficult – even interpreting the task might be a daunting challenge. See our documents about understanding the Request for Proposal (RFP), managing the task, and creating impactful presentation to communicate your ideas to the judges.

Finally, we’ve made one of our old RFPs public for you to practice with, if you would like to!

Note: some of these webpages are still under construction and may take you to the UKSDC website. This is intended as all of the Programme Book material is being digitalised by the untiring efforts of the UKSDC community.