I agree with the time line; it's realistic. (I have a tendency to get riled up when people think hiking is super easy and doing 25 miles in one day takes only a few hours--a lot of t.v shows/movies have a tendency to do this.)

Don't worry about the lack of description with the raft! It's hard to avoid information dumps sometimes, but you've been balancing your writing well. (So, the pods are [i]inside[/i] the dome, btw?) Besides this is a test run, anyways. Things will work themselves out. 

As for having the survivors in space, I think it makes sense. Because the scientists might not be able to predict everything that will occur when the meteors hit earth, so they would want to put the teams in a place where they would be the most secure and stable. Thus in orbit. Something to consider, though is maybe the guide not waking the other occupants up until they're closer to land? But that's just something for a later time/group to worry about. It helps cut out the random floating time and allows the characters to be distracted by other things rather then themselves in a boat in the open sea. Ya get what I mean?

Happy you like the t-shirt touch. :) It's amazing what getting matching t-shirt for a group will do! Have you ever heard of character interrogation? It's essentially what you did in the CS where you had the questions for the characters to answer. I find doing a few sessions of just dialogue like that really helps me understand my characters and flesh them out without having to add a shit ton to their history or something like that. 

Happy writing. :)