It's weird how we can be the only doing the survey for joinging Von Braun.
There's absolutely NO people to be seen. On the earth level there are some few civilian (with corpse faces......) and on each training base there's some few worker and an welcoming droid.

Where's the other cadets? WHY AM I SO ALONE?!

Because you smell bad.

Not just a plain droid.

A MACARENA droid. I assume everyone has seen that by now?

The design of this segment seems partially rushed or constrained by budget/design philosophy. The environmental design is rather good, but the whole "Step into the shuttle to go spend one year bumping your stats one or two points" thing seems like a cheap way out of the silent protagonist limitation. No unique gameplay features are found in the tutorial and career segment, ie they didn't include interactive human characters and unique computer interactions but has you actually run into doors to answer questions. Players would not spend more than 15 minutes on this part of the game so it wouldn't be worth the effort making the place feel more lively and believeable as those features would never be used later in the game.

Just now I remember Quake had this as a fun way to select the difficulty level of the singleplayer adventure, where "nightmare mode" was something you had to find hidden in the level!

Agreed with sufyan.

It might be worth of note, that there is an easter egg during the training choices, and the start of the longest easter egg in the game just up the grav shaft.

Hahahahahaha.