Inside SpaceForge
Simulations, AI coaches, and verifiable work. One cohort workspace.
Most graduate programs ship a generic learning-management system and call it a platform. The SpaceForge workspace is built for the cross-disciplinary work the program actually does — every part exists because someone in the cohort needs it during a real deliverable, not because a vendor included it. You get live AI coaches that read your work, simulations that put you in the seat of a real decision, industry intelligence wired into the lessons, and a verifiable record of what you can actually do.
Don't read about it — run it
Five features, live, right here.
Interactive demos of the workspace the cohort uses daily — the AI coach, the competency radar, a live mission board, the instructor early-warning system, and the weekly curriculum shape. All demo data is synthetic; the real engines wait for you in the free sandbox and the enrolled workspace.
Deliverable coaching session · synthetic example
Student
Draft thesis: our 6U cubesat should downlink through a single commercial ground-station provider to cut integration cost.Coaching in progress…
What the cohort gets
- Coaches read the actual deliverable, not a rubric summary.
- Every exchange is logged to the competency record.
- Faculty see where the coach pushed and how the student moved.
Everything you need lives on one dashboard.
Lessons, team work, AI coaches, simulations, live industry intelligence, and a verifiable record of what you can do — one login, one dashboard.
This week
Venture · week 5
Capstone diligence room opens Friday
Streak
14 days
Reading
3 papers queued
Sim
Habitat capstone
Team
Diligence draft
Illustrative preview. spaceforge.asu.edu is a proposed domain, not an official ASU page, subject to institutional approval.
What you'll do here
Eleven features. Four reasons to use them.
Learning
How you write, research, and connect ideas
Draft with a coach watching
AI flags thin arguments and weak structure while you write — before faculty ever see the draft. A criteria-aware check runs on demand from inside any deliverable.
Outsource the literature-review grunt work
The research coach surfaces the handful of papers worth reading instead of the hundreds a generic search returns, and cites the exact passage that supports your argument.
See how concepts connect
A visual map of how ideas connect across orbital mechanics, policy, launch operations, and venture work — so an insight from one quarter resurfaces when you need it the next.
Collaboration
Teams that form themselves; missions that demand them
Find collaborators automatically
The Collision Engine spots when your work overlaps a classmate's — same scenario, same regulatory clause, same constraint — and introduces you before either of you files.
Run a real mission with a team
Mission Control puts six disciplines in one room making the same decision under real pressure. Every scenario carries a deck of curveballs so the team has to adapt, not just execute.
Teach what you brought in
Earn the Community Contributor credential for running a peer workshop on a discipline you already know. Engineers teaching MBAs orbital mechanics; lawyers teaching engineers regulatory practice.
Intelligence
Live industry signal piped into the curriculum
Use this week's launches as homework
Real launches, agency notices, and policy moves become live case studies as they happen. Industry intelligence gets pre-tagged to your active modules and capstone topic.
Track contracts that match your skills
Federal procurement intelligence filtered to the work your skills already qualify you for, surfaced inside capstone scoping and career planning.
Know what isn't sticking before the test
Predictive analytics flag the concepts you'll need to revisit a week before the deliverable — not after. Targeted flashcards generate from the gap.
Career
What you walk out with
Earn industry-recognized credentials
Map SpaceForge work to industry-recognized certifications. A public verifier lets any employer confirm a credential in seconds.
Show employers verified work
Simulation results and graded deliverables an employer can actually verify — not transcripts they can't read. Your independence score travels with the portfolio.
Why it works
Three things most online programs don't do.
Three pieces of the program are the actual difference: how the simulations work, how the AI coaches stay in your academic context, and the discipline behind the curriculum.
Simulations · decision practice, not multiple choice
Real decisions, with consequences that follow you.
Each simulation puts you in the seat of someone who has to make a real call — committing propellant on a deorbit burn, sourcing a long-lead-time component under export-control rules, defending a market thesis to a venture-diligence panel. The clock runs. Curveballs hit. Your earlier choices carry forward into the next decision. You don't pick A, B, or C from a menu; you weigh tradeoffs the way the work actually happens.
Subject-matter advisors run alongside you — a facts voice that cites what's known, a synthesis voice that argues the call, and a longer-horizon voice that flags what might change. Every scenario carries a difficulty range so engineers, MBAs, and policy people can run the same exercise from their own entry point and still arrive at a defensible decision.
- Real decisions, not multiple-choice quizzes
- Live curveballs every run; outcomes carry forward
- Open to engineers, MBAs, and policy backgrounds alike
- Replay from any decision to test a different call
AI coaching · trained on your work, not a generic chatbot
Coaches that read the criteria you'll be graded against.
Most education AI ships a chat box pointed at a generic model. SpaceForge ships AI coaches that read your modules, your competency profile, your prior drafts, and the assignment criteria themselves before answering anything. You can ask the writing coach to find the gaps in your draft, ask the research coach for the eight papers worth reading on your capstone topic, or ask the study planner to rebuild your week around a slipped deadline.
You see your usage. Faculty see usage at the cohort level, never your individual conversation. Privacy and prompt-injection defenses are standardized across every coach so you don't have to think about them. When the AI service is unavailable, the platform tells you that and gives you a useful fallback rather than pretending the call succeeded.
- Three live coaches today: writing, research, study planning
- Every call audited; faculty see cohort-level usage, not your conversation
- Your conversation stays yours; not used to train future models
- Honest fallback when AI is unavailable, not silent failure
Curriculum · cross-disciplinary by construction
Cross-disciplinary by construction, not by claim.
Most space programs are taught from a single discipline — engineering, or business, or policy — and bolt the others on as electives. SpaceForge is built the other way. Every week argues a single question and brings several disciplines to bear on it, so an engineer learns to read a contract, a business student learns to read an orbit, and a policy student learns to read a supply-chain risk. The combinations that show up in the lessons are not the ones you find in the standard textbook sequence.
Every shipped lesson goes through a multi-stage editorial review before it reaches you — accuracy checks, originality checks, defensibility of every comparative claim, and a cross-background read so the lesson lands whether you came from engineering, business, or policy. A lesson that drifts gets caught before you read it, not after.
- Multiple disciplines argued in every week, by construction
- Each lesson passes a multi-stage editorial review before publish
- Factual claims verified at authoring time; drift caught before you read
- Substantial weekly reading, not skim-and-quiz
Every AI feature, described
Every AI feature, grouped by what it does for you.
Live coaches plus analytics, intelligence, collaboration, and assessment AI — all wired to the same picture of your academic work. Status tags reflect the current state: Live means in production today, Shipping means in the active sprint.
Coaching
Coaches that read your full academic record
Writing Coach
Reads the assignment criteria and your prior drafts. Tells you which expectations the draft already meets and which still need work, with a suggested rewrite. Run it as often as you want before faculty see anything.
Research Coach
Searches academic databases on your capstone topic and returns the handful of papers worth reading from the hundreds a search returns. Cites the exact passage that supports your argument and remembers what you have already cited.
Study Planner
Builds a personalized pace from your progress. Adjusts your week-to-week plan and warns you in advance if a deliverable is at risk.
Pre-Submission Check
One click on the submission form gives you a checklist of which assignment criteria your draft already covers and which it doesn't, with suggested fixes. Faculty don't see the check; submission isn't blocked.
Targeted Flashcards
When a quiz shows you missed a concept, the platform builds flashcards on that exact gap, schedules them with proven spaced-repetition timing, and adds them to your study deck.
Self-Knowledge
How you actually learn — visible to you, not just to faculty
AI-Collaboration Insights
Track how your AI usage shifts over time — what you ask, how the questions get sharper, and the balance of AI-assisted versus independent work. You see your own arc; faculty see the cohort distribution.
Independence Score
Surfaced on your portfolio. Shows growth in how you use AI over time so employers can read the shape of your work, not just whether AI was involved.
Learning Style Profile
After a few weeks of activity, the platform shows you which study patterns you actually rely on — deep focus, quick sprints, collaborative bursts, analytical drilling, or broad exploration. You see the profile; faculty see the cohort distribution.
Early-Warning Signal
A daily check that flags students who look at risk of falling behind, weeks before traditional grades would catch it. Faculty see the flag first; if the pattern continues, the student gets a gentle private nudge.
Concept-Mastery Heatmap
A visual map of which concepts you've mastered across all modules, and which lessons drove the strongest gains.
Cohort Benchmarks
See where you stand against your cohort on each module without losing your name to a curve. Surfaces the topics where you're pulling away from the median and the topics where you're behind.
Career & Portfolio
AI features that turn your work into something employers can read
Resume Generator
Pulls your verified work and writes resume bullet points in the standard situation-action-result format that recruiters expect. Each bullet is verifiable through your public credential page.
Semester Narrative
End-of-semester AI summary of what you actually did — the concepts you mastered, the deliverables that landed, the simulations you led. Reads like a recommendation letter you can share.
Career-Goal Tags
Every module shows a personalized note on why it matters for the specific career you're aiming at. Nothing gets hidden; every module gets a hook tied to your goal.
Career-Path Tracker
A roadmap view of how your skills are progressing toward your declared career goal — what you've built, what's missing, which modules close the remaining gaps.
Industry-Cert Mapping
Shows how your SpaceForge work maps to industry-recognized certifications so you walk out with credentials employers already know how to read.
Industry Intelligence
Live signal piped into the curriculum
Industry Dashboard
A live feed of industry news, launches, station operations, research, and careers — pulled from a curated set of sources so you see what's happening this week, not last quarter.
Personalized News Feed
Each day the platform picks the industry stories most relevant to your current modules and capstone topic. Two relevant articles appear inline on each lesson page.
Federal Contract Intel
A filtered view of federal procurement opportunities tagged to the work your skills already qualify you for. Surfaces in capstone scoping and career planning.
Cross-Module Knowledge Graph
A visual map of how concepts repeat across modules, so an insight from your venture week resurfaces when you hit the same constraint in operations weeks.
Collaboration
AI that opens doors between cohort members
Collision Engine
Detects when your work overlaps a classmate's — same scenario, same regulatory clause, same constraint — and opens a shared thread before either of you files. Cross-disciplinary collaborations form on their own instead of being assigned.
Mission Control
A team-based simulation where six different roles run the same scenario in real time. Faculty review how the team worked together, not just the final answer.
Discussion Synthesis
An AI summary of long discussion threads so the group can see the canonical reading of where the debate landed.
Cohort Match
When two cohort members share a skill cluster and a stated career interest, the platform introduces them — "three classmates have the same year-three goal as you."
Assessment & Research
Validated instruments, built into the program
Concept Check (Pre/Post)
Short quizzes before and after each module so you can see your own learning gain in concrete numbers. Cohort-level data feeds the program's continuous improvement.
Research Health Dashboard
A health-score view for the program's research instruments — consent rates, response completeness, recent activity — built for ethics-board reporting.
Privacy-Safe Data Export
Researchers can explore the privacy-versus-detail tradeoff before generating any dataset. Every export is logged; consent is tracked end to end.
Faculty Intervention SLA
When the early-warning system flags a student, the platform commits faculty to a 48-hour response with concrete next steps.
Foundations
What runs underneath every AI call
Persistent Context
Every coach pulls your modules, grades, reflections, badges, prior coach feedback, and capstone scope into a single picture before generating anything. No generic replies.
Prompt-Injection Defense
User-supplied text passes through standardized defenses before reaching the model so a clever question can't override your instructions or another student's privacy.
Structured Output Contracts
Every AI response is checked against a strict shape so a hallucinated field is caught at the boundary, not in your interface.
Per-User Limits + Audit Log
Every AI call is rate-limited per user and recorded in an audit log with model and cost. Faculty can audit; you can see your own usage.
Versioned Coach Prompts
Coach prompts are versioned so improvements ship without breaking the historical record of what advice you got and when.
Graceful Degradation
When the AI service is unavailable, the platform shows you that explicitly and gives you a useful fallback. Nothing pretends to have worked.
The simulation catalog
What you'll actually run.
Simulations are organized by program area. Each one puts you in the seat of someone who has to make a real decision under realistic constraints, with consequences that carry into the next decision. Here's the kind of work you'll do.
Mission Systems — weekly simulations across the lifecycle
- Frame a real mission, name your stakeholders, and commit to a question someone could disagree with
- Plan an orbital maneuver under stakeholder pressure and a fixed propellant budget
- Trade off propulsion technologies — solid, liquid, electric — against schedule and risk
- Negotiate a commercial launch contract under realistic launch-cost economics
- Integrate spacecraft subsystems where mass and power constraints cascade across decisions
- Run a multi-phase operations scenario from launch through commissioning
- Make an end-of-life disposal call that satisfies safety, debris, and regulatory rules
Payload Engineering — weekly instrument and integration scenarios
- Translate science requirements into instrument architecture
- Trade detector performance against environmental survival
- Design a calibration plan that survives launch and aging
- Source long-lead-time payload components under export-control rules
- Sequence an integration-and-test campaign under schedule pressure
- Run early-orbit operations through first light and nominal handover
- Plan payload operations through end of mission
Space Economics — defend a market thesis under live pressure
- Defend a space-market thesis to a venture-diligence panel
- Build a capital plan across equity, debt, and government cost-share
- Map a multi-tier supply chain and its concentration risks
- Argue orbital infrastructure as a durable economic asset class
Capstones and module finals — multi-day decision exercises
- Architect a long-duration habitat and defend it to a stakeholder panel
- Coordinate a multi-asset constellation through normal operations and anomalies
- Run a public-market pitch under regulator and short-seller scrutiny
- Make planetary-protection calls on an outer-solar-system mission
- Manage an anomaly cascade against a hard mission clock
- Negotiate as a delegation in a multi-party space-treaty round
- Govern a congested orbital regime
- Allocate capital from a fund-of-funds under regulatory uncertainty
- Architect a relay-and-communications network under spectrum politics
- Plan a multi-decade crewed deep-space mission
- Draft a governance charter for an off-world settlement
- Defend a full mission concept to a board-level review
Operations and crisis — real-time decision-making under pressure
- A 72-hour immersive crisis exercise with anomaly cascades, console authority, public communications, and an after-action review
- Make a collision-avoidance call when the data is incomplete
- Plan a controlled deorbit and end-of-life debris response
- Hand off an anomaly between operations and engineering at the right moment
- Build a political coalition under scarce launch slots
- Plan a workforce surge to a contract-award timeline
- Run an adversarial threat assessment for national-security space
- Make design choices an underwriter will actually insure
Strategy, policy, and markets
- Run an investor-diligence exercise on your own capstone
- Construct a diplomatic case for a contested space-policy claim
- Bid in a spectrum auction under regulatory and competitive pressure
- Enter an international market under cross-border regulatory friction
- Negotiate a defense-prime to commercial-newspace partnership
- Wind down a joint venture under contractual lockup
- Architect a lunar habitat under realistic crew and resupply constraints
- Build an Earth-observation business model that satisfies customer and regulator both
Try it before you apply.
Create a free account to run a sandbox simulation, or preview a guided lesson before requesting admissions guidance.