Every SSDC event describes requirements for designing a future space settlement or habitat to a very specific set of requirements defined by a Request for Proposal (RFP).  The scenarios are offered in a five-year chronology that illustrates a possible Roadmap for how people will develop commercial interests and settlements in space.  In each year of the chronology, at least four or five different scenarios for large settlements and smaller habitats or bases are offered.  Students who participate in SSDCs for their entire high school careers will not see the same scenario twice.  When the “same” scenario is offered every five years, key requirements are changed to cause designs for prior-years RFPs to be non-compliant.

Throughout the SSDC five-year chronology of scenarios, the Foundation Society and its contractors expand space infrastructure throughout the inner solar system.  The Foundation Society has established a system for naming its largest space settlement communities:  suffix indicates location, and communities with the same suffix receive names in alphabetical order.  Suffixes in use throughout the chronology are:

• “at” = (in orbit) around Terra (Earth)
• “al” = (in orbit) around Luna (Earth’s Moon)
• “ol” = on Luna
• “as” = (in orbit) around the sun Sol
• “am” = (in orbit) around Mars
• “om” = on Mars
• “ia” = in the Asteroid Belt
• “ah” = (in orbit) around Mercury
• “oh” = on Mercury
• “av” = (in orbit) around Venus
• “ov” = on Venus

The five-year chronology of SSDC scenarios presumes people will expand their economic activities in the inner solar system in the following order:

Alexandriat, the first major Space Settlement, is not a Competition scenario. As more space settlements are built, it is repurposed to be a university town.