Five days.
One mission.
The Global Finals are not a conference. Students arrive as delegations and leave as companies: elected, organised, briefing against a deadline and defending their bid in English.
How the
five days work.
Each day has a different job. The pressure builds towards the 24-hour challenge and the final defence, and the last day belongs to recognition.
Arrival and the opening
Check-in, the opening ceremony and a keynote, then the first company meeting where students from different countries and schools meet each other.
Team building and elections
Mock presentations and technical department sessions in the morning. In the afternoon candidates speak in English and each company elects its own management team.
The 24-hour design challenge
The committee releases a new on-site Request for Proposal. Companies plan, negotiate interfaces between departments and build one integrated bid against the clock, with an evening Red Team Review.
The defence
Final preparation, then each company presents for thirty-five minutes and answers fifteen minutes of technical and commercial questions from the jury.
Recognition and departure
Awards and closing, followed by the scheduled shuttle from the venue to the airport.
This is the programme framework, not a guaranteed hour-by-hour itinerary. Detailed session timing and site instructions are issued to confirmed delegations.
Forty-eight strangers,
one bid.
A virtual company is a small organisation under real constraints: elected leadership, five departments, a deadline and an external client.
- Formation. Students meet peers from other countries and regions, schools and disciplines, and are placed into a company of roughly forty to fifty.
- An adult chair. Each company is supported by an appointed adult Chair of the Board. The students still elect their own management team and carry the work.
- Elections. Candidates make short speeches in English; the company votes for its own management team.
- A new mission. The committee releases the on-site RFP under the IDSDO simulation — a mission no one in the room has seen before.
- Technical collaboration. Departments plan separately, then negotiate the interfaces: power, mass, schedule, cost.
- Red Team Review. Experts challenge the assumptions and help the company find the weaknesses before the jury does.
- The defence. Thirty-five minutes in front of the jury, fifteen minutes of questions. Everything has to hold.
Six disciplines,
one proposal.
GFSSM is open to students in grades 7–12, including those whose strength is in computing, business, architecture, design, communication or the arts. No prior aerospace expertise is required — only English and a serious team effort. Each team may bring up to two mentor teachers, who guide and advise without writing the work.
Defensible numbers
Assumptions, principles, calculations and source-based analysis that hold up under a reviewer’s question.
Interfaces
Designing subsystems that interact, and naming the trade-offs between performance, safety and resources.
Departments
Dividing work across a team, then aligning decisions, deadlines and deliverables into one document.
A business case
Realistic schedules, cost assumptions and a proposal that is internally consistent rather than optimistic.
English, under fire
Visuals, written argument, a pitch and a defence in front of people who will interrupt.
Working across borders
Collaborating respectfully with students from different schools, cultures and disciplines, on a shared clock.
More than
a certificate.
A GFSSM participant can point to a chain of work: a design problem interpreted, a proposal written, a subsystem owned, a bid defended.
A proposal
An English-language document with engineering diagrams, quantified assumptions, cost models and presentation material.
An academic result
Independent evaluation against an international rubric, with written feedback from subject experts.
A department role
Documented individual contribution: deadlines met, interfaces agreed, decisions defended.
- Company
- Champion, first runner-up and second runner-up, by decision of the final jury
- Individual
- Best Leadership, Most Valuable Employee, Best Speaker of each company, Best Speakers of the Finals
- Everyone
- Official participation certificates issued through the national or regional organizer
Past submissions have included city master plans, transport networks, crop-production strategies and investment models. Alumni have gone on to universities including Cambridge, Cornell, Imperial College London, Carnegie Mellon and UCLA.
Participation is one element of a student’s broader academic and personal development, not an admissions promise.
The week,
as it looked.
Photographs from the 2026 Global Finals in Beijing.
See what the
2027 brief asks.
Europa, a thousand residents, and a contract that has to hold together technically and commercially. The brief is published in full for the season.
