Mission Space Lab Mentor Guide
Stage 4 - Submission
The last stage is the submission process for Mission Space Lab, where you send us your team’s final program for evaluation and testing by our panel of specialists. Teams whose programs are awarded flight status will be invited to attend a special event with an ESA astronaut.
Please submit your teams’ programs by 12:00 CET 16 February 2026.
This is when you will need the email that you received when you registered your team in stage 1. This has a unique link through which you can submit your team’s finished and tested program.
Your team’s program should be saved as a file called main.py and added to a zip file along with any other files that your team’s solution uses. The submission form will only accept zip files.
The form also has a reminder of the requirements that your team’s program must meet. Take some time to review these before you hit the ‘Submit’ button. Every year, there are some teams that miss out on the opportunity to have their programs run in space because they have not met one of these criteria.
Here are some factors that will increase the chances of your team’s program achieving flight status:
It must run without errors and follow the rules
It should be well-documented and understandable. We recommend including plenty of in-line comments
Any attempts to ‘fix’ the result will not be looked on favourably, so discourage your team from adding a sneaky line of code that rejects any answer that does not match or come close to the accepted value, for example
Creative solutions to the problem, even if experimental, are welcome
The age of participants will be considered, so teams of younger participants will not be expected to have written as complex programs as teams of older participants
