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Some of the students at the Oortcorp training school called Phase Six the "garbage course." When those students graduated and shipped out to work for the project they might change their minds, because Phase Six was important.
The reason it was important had to do with the places where they would go to work. Those places were spread out over many billions of kilometers of space and they performed quite different functions, but they all had one vital feature in common. Each one was no more than a metal shell that was afloat in the most hostile environment human beings have ever tried to survive in: space.
Space is lethal to a degree that nothing on Earth can match. Stripped naked of resources anywhere on Earth, a human being could still survive, at least for a time. He could go weeks without food, days without even water. Without air to breathe, though, he would die at once. If that same human being were cast unprotected into space his lungs would burst, his blood would boil, and he would be dead in minutes.
The only thing that keeps all spacefarers from suffering that quick and brutal death is their complex of pumps and water purifiers and air regenerators and power-plant and life-support systems, and those systems were practically identical in every station of the Oortcorp project.
If anything went wrong—as, sooner or later, something always does—it had to be fixed at once. If it wasn't, people would die. There would be no outside experts to save them. There wasn't any plumber to call up or ambulance to summon across the million-kilometer stretches of empty space. The people who worked there had no one to rely on but themselves. It was they alone who had to learn every last one of the skills that were needed to keep that complex and fallible system running; and that was what Phase Six was all about.