Gernot Grömer, an astrophysicist who calls himself a shipbuilder for Mars, runs the Austrian Space Forum and its analog astronaut missions, simulated expeditions meant to rehearse a journey to the Red Planet decades before it happens. The film follows AMADEE-24, a 2024 mission conducted with the Armenian Space Agency in the Ararat region, chosen because its geology mimics the Martian surface, tracking the crew through equipment failures, communication lags, and the daily grind of pretending to live on another planet. Grömer's team also builds a nanosatellite designed to track space debris, a problem the film frames bluntly: near-Earth orbit is turning into a junkyard. A second thread follows Stefan Brieschenk, a rocket engineer in Augsburg who founded Rocket Factory Augsburg in 2018 to keep Europe competitive against American and Chinese launch providers, testing hardware in southern Germany and in the far north of Sweden while repurposing brewing-industry tanks to cut costs. Interviews with both men and footage from mission control rooms and launch sites lay out what a commercial and scientific space race actually costs, and who is paying for it.