The leader of NASA’s Psyche mission has tips for interplanetary team building

May 9, 2026

6 min read

Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm

The leader of NASA’s Psyche mission has tips for interplanetary team building

Lindy Elkins-Tanton, principal investigator of NASA’s Psyche mission, explains in her new book how lessons from interplanetary exploration can help people solve problems together

By K. R. Callaway edited by Lee Billings

In her new book, Lindy Elkins-Tanton shares the leadership lessons she learned from a career pondering planets.

James Tanton

As the crickets chirped at 2 A.M. near Kennedy Space Center, a large team of scientists was puzzling over data tracking the temperature of a rocket component. A cold-gas thruster, which would help position NASA’s Psyche spacecraft to communicate with Earth after launch, wasn’t working properly. And with just 12 days to go before liftoff, the anomaly placed the entire $1.2-billion mission in jeopardy.

Faced with such a high stress situation, it would be understandable for the scientists to lose their cool, but the storm of emotion never came. As Lindy Elkins-Tanton writes in the opening of her new book, Mission Ready: How to Build Teams That Perform under Pressure, “There was hardly a misstep. Everyone listened, everyone made suggestions, everyone joined one or more subteams testing every possible solution, working around the clock.”

The spacecraft ultimately launched as planned and is now approaching the halfway mark of its six-year-long voyage to reach the asteroid 16 Psyche. Once it arrives in 2029, it will spend nearly two years studying this mysterious space rock, which, based on telescopic observations, appears to be made mainly of metal. Elkins-Tanton is a professor of planetary science at Arizona State University and the Psyche mission’s principal investigator.

On supporting science journalism

If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

Despite her long career in planetary science, the mission’s cold-thruster close call marked one of the most enlightening moments Elkins-Tanton has ever experienced in her work. The same project management techniques required to pull off an interplanetary mission, she realized, can also be valuable in myriad other endeavors right here on Earth. As Elkins-Tanton looks forward to the discoveries that Psyche will yield, she is also reflecting on the past. Her book outlines what leading the mission taught her about creating successful teams—and provides a framework for others to develop their leadership skills.

Scientific American spoke with Elkins-Tanton about leadership, team building and leveraging soft skills in an extremely technical career.

[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]

Your book opens with a high-pressure situation that you say showed the “heart and soul” of your team. Do you think maintaining calm in a high-pressure situation is a teachable skill?

I think it’s something people can learn, yes—and I also think they can unlearn it. It has to be constantly maintained. And one of the things that was helping our team maintain it was that we built up a huge amount of trust. I think that everyone knew their expertise was highly respected.

Throughout your book, it was clear how much you credit the people around you for supporting the positive workplace culture you aimed to create. Would you say that you see leadership as a form of collaboration?

There are times when leadership is guidance and when a leader has to be willing to make a final decision, but short of those moments, I think it’s all about collaboration. The ability that one in a leadership position has to try to help everyone else succeed is an incredible gift.

Did you have any strategies for developing your own leadership style?

When I took my first major leadership position, I wasn’t that young, but I hadn’t really spent any time thinking of myself as a leader. I remember looking down at my hand one day and thinking, “Do I have to stop wearing sparkle nail polish?” In the end, I made a very freeing decision: I was going to be the best leader that I could be only if I was authentically myself. Much more importantly than sparkle nail polish was knowing what my values were like. Instead of saying, “The team creates the product, and the individual is irrelevant,” I know that individuals are what a team is.

It sounds like that leadership style is predicated on having good “soft skills.” What are your strategies for developing those in a technical career?

One moment that taught me these skills really predates the Psyche mission entirely. I was in my early 20s. I got a job as a management consultant, and we were working with a big helicopter manufacturer, trying to fix some issues they