For Loredana Bessone’s students, failure is not an option. As head of the European Space Agency’s Instructional Technologies, Special Skills Training, and Exploration Unit, she makes sure that astronauts are ready to handle everything from space walks to crew pep talks. Bessone’s curriculum sounds like an MIT-Outward Bound mashup: fluid management, medicine, robotics, team dynamics, field mapping. With so much to learn, astronauts can’t afford to become experts in every area. “If we overwhelmed them with a lot of extra information, they would probably just die,” says Bessone, whose teaching aids include everything from a swimming pool to the ESA’s model of the International Space Station (above). Instead, it’s her job to distill the essential skills into lessons she can pass on in just a few hours.

To teach the art of moving in a spacesuit, for example, Bessone first went through part of NASA’s official training herself. Then she developed an introductory class for the ESA. In Bessone’s simulation, astronauts perform tasks underwater while wearing Michelin Man-like outfits, huge gloves, and a full face mask. It’s not meant to be fun: “You hear their voices trembling and their breath accelerating,” she says. But that’s the point of training—to acclimate students to the kinds of stresses they’ll encounter in space.

Bessone says she’s happier as a trainer than she would be as an astronaut. “I like to invent things,” she says. The idea for her toughest class came to her when she was looking for the most remote place to hold survival training: Bessone now leads trainees into a pitch-black cave for six days. “A cave has a lot of resemblance to space,” she explains. Your sense of time goes out of whack, you can’t go anywhere without equipment, and rescue is a long way off. At least in the cave, someone can hear you scream.