Mission Ready

Order Mission Ready: How to Build Teams That Perform Under Pressure. Publication date is April 21, 2026.

Contact me about speaking on teams, leadership, and space exploration, and purchase the book here:

Hachette Book Group | Bookshop.org | Barnes and Noble | Amazon |

Praise for Mission Ready:

“Space missions fail for human reasons—and succeed because of them. With a great selection of space-flight stories and grounded research, Elkins-Tanton delivers a model for leadership that shows how clarity, kindness, and courage lead to mission success for any team.” ―Bob Smith, former CEO, Blue Origin

“Mission Ready is a powerful guide to building teams that thrive under pressure. Elkins-Tanton shows that when individuals are empowered, culture is thoughtfully built, and leadership is grounded in trust and transparency, teams can accomplish extraordinary things—even in the most challenging environments.” ―Adena Friedman, chair and CEO, Nasdaq

“I’ve been hanging out in high-performance innovation ecosystems for 50 years now—Boston, Silicon Valley, Austin. High-performance teams make the right things happen. One of their key skills is being able to take conversations up a level, to talk about what they are talking about. The good news from Professor Elkins-Tanton is that NASA teams of rocket scientists aren’t much different. Mission Ready is a how-to book about how to practice what she calls ‘metacognition.’ Read it, then send a copy to all your team members.” ―Bob Metcalfe, Ethernet inventor and Turing Laureate

“Elkins-Tanton’s book reminds us of something we know but keep forgetting—that it is not technology alone that moves us forward. People in teams need to make things happen, from small start-ups to monumental undertakings like the NASA Psyche mission. Mission Ready is a practical guide—with checklists, surveys, and actionable advice—but the real experiences and examples chronicled by Elkins-Tanton are what bring these valuable lessons to life.” ―Deepak Kamra, general partner, Canaan Partners

Praise for A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman, published by William Morrow: My memoir about life as a scientist and exploration of Earth and space.

Contact me about speaking on teams, leadership, and space exploration, and purchase Portrait through one of these links:

Amazon | Bookshop.org | Google Play | HarperCollins | IndieBound

“ A riveting book, beautifully written. . . . With a brave candor, Elkins-Tanton examines all aspects of her experiences—personal and professional, the good and the bad—to plumb the very meaning of her life. . . . [She provides] a ringside seat to the discomforts and thrills of a geological expedition.” —Washington Post

“ Elkins-Tanton shines in her ability to render the process of scientific discovery in eloquent prose. . . . A wonderful paean to the beauty of scientific exploration.” —Publishers Weekly

“ A deeply personal and enlightening book of one amazing woman’s leadership and teachings in science and self-discovery.” —Col. Chris Hadfield, former commander of the International Space Station and #1 bestselling author of An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth

“ The principal investigator of NASA’s Psyche mission lays bare the challenges and rewards of succeeding as a woman in a male-dominated field and how the sublime beauty of the universe brought her strength and solace. . . . Enthralling and inspiring. . . . A fearless, riveting, and galvanizing book from a star in the U.S. space program.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“ Lindy Elkins-Tanton has led a fascinating life, full of wonder and discovery and also pain and loss. Her memoir, A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman, is fierce, absorbing, and ultimately inspiring.” —Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sixth Extinction

“[A] beautiful and inspiring memoir.” —The Christian Science Monitor (Best Books of the Year, 2022)

“ A captivating story about an exceptional career and a remarkable life.” —Ars Technica

About

That’s me on the left, under the spacecraft. I’m the lead (P.I.) of the NASA Psyche mission. (Media inquiries for Psyche: Ian O’Neill, JPL: ian.j.oneill@jpl.nasa.gov)

The origin of rocky planets and the evolution of the solid Earth are the topics of my research. Here’s my peer-reviewed publication list, and the other books I’ve written.

At the University of California, Berkeley, I’m the Director of the Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL), and professor in Earth and Planetary Science. The Space Sciences Laboratory has been building and flying robotic space missions for 65 years (want to propose one with us? get in touch!).

I believe that all people should have a sense of agency and confidence in learning and problem-solving. Turner Bohlen, Carolyn Bickers, James Tanton, and I founded Beagle Learning.

Academic research needs to be more focused on big questions, more effective, and more inclusive. Here’s my essay, “Time to Say Goodbye to Our Heroes?” laying it down.

Here’s a bio with some photos. I enjoy speaking and outreach.

Natural World

Hawks. Mosses. Lichens. Fishers. Foxes. Quail. Lizards. I deeply admire and am fascinated by the natural world.

I take photos of natural textures at all scales, and I use a night-time and day-time trail camera, and I work on identifying plants and mosses and insects. And it’s fun to share.

Frost crystals on a cold morning in Massachusetts. Credit: Lindy Elkins-Tanton

Billows of fine grass in the afternoon sunlight feels infinitely peaceful to me. Credit: Lindy Elkins-Tanton

Speaking and Workshops

Speaking about teams and leadership and science and space and learning is a pleasure, whether the audience is from a company, the public, or a school. And I love working with teams, especially tech teams, on developing communications and culture. Be in touch and we’ll schedule.

I give dozens of talks, panel discussions, and workshops per year, ranging from a small elementary school classroom to hundreds or thousands of people at a big public event. You can get a sense of some of my speaking styles on my Youtube channel.

Over the many years that I have worked on teams at junior and senior levels and in leadership, I have seen teams succeed, and I have seen them fail. I’ve found that the human is both the most miraculous and the most devastating part of every story. Science and engineering are the structure of what I am doing, but people are the way it gets done.

I’ve had career-long intersectional experience with teams across the private sector, in government, in academia—I have worked as a management consultant and then as an independent business plan writer for tech startups, as the co-founder of an education tech startup, as an advisor to tech companies and venture capital firms, and as the originator and leader of the NASA Psyche mission.

These projects have been at all stages—in development, in production, and with teams that needed change and those that were purring along. I focus on developing and supporting teams when the pressure is on and the stakes are high.

I’ve been asked to speak about team culture at organizations as varied as Apple, Unilever, Honeybee Robotics, Amazon, and Stanford University. Let me know if you’d like me to speak for your group or facilitate a workshop on communication or culture.

Today I am the lead of the NASA Psyche mission, a $1B robotic probe going to a metallic asteroid, and Director of the Space Sciences Laboratory at UC Berkeley. I’m also co-founder of Beagle Learning, where we design learning experiences for the information age and work with schools and communities. I earned my BS, MS, and PhD at MIT, and have worked at Brown University, MIT, and the Carnegie Institution for Science. My CV is available here if you’re into CVs!

Here are some of my talks and workshops:

TALKS

In these talks we go through the story of discovery, challenge, and future vision together … interacting with the audience from the stage is something I love.

Mission Ready: How to Build Teams That Perform Under Pressure

Mission Ready provides a blueprint for building strong teams capable of delivering exceptional results in high-pressure situations. Leaders set the tone, but every team member determines both their own success and the success of the team. Drawing on social science, cognitive science, and organizational science research, Elkins-Tanton gives practical advice on how both individual contributors and leaders can excel. Even for projects that don’t involve launching a rocket into space, the lessons in this talk will help your audience take their teams to new heights.

The NASA Psyche Mission: One Team’s Journey to a Metal World

What does it mean to work with hundreds of talented people design and build a spacecraft so complex that no single person understands how it all works? And then, after launch, that spacecraft has to work without repair as it flies for a decade on a mission of discovery in space. “Psyche” is both the name of an asteroid in the main belt, orbiting out past Mars, and the name of our NASA mission to visit that asteroid. Psyche appears to be metallic, a kind of world humans have never visited.

In this interactive talk about teams, having a vision, and persisting through incredible challenges, audiences will learn:

Some of the significant crises the team faced and how we overcame them,
How we built our successful team culture and communications, and
The top five skills individuals need to be the best possible team members.

Space exploration is inspiring and mind-expanding, but the real purpose is showing what we humans can do when we pull together.

Given about 100 times in the last three years, including at Maxar Corporation, Tetra Tech, Unilever, MIT, Goldstone (NASA Deep Space Network), SpaceX (1,200 people, their most highly-attended all-company lecture ever), at the Canadian School of Public Service, the Explorers Club, and Jeff Bezos’ private MARS conference.

Keeping Your Team Tight in an Age of AI and Remote Work

Every day we hear about AI and remote work, both of which replace close human interactions, and wonder what these trends will do to our companies, our teams, and ourselves. Now we’re in a world where as much as 30% of the workforce is remote, and where the majority of workers use generative AI for their jobs. Where does that leave the central functions of human communication and innovation, human problem-solving, and the future of our jobs?

In this interactive talk about human teams, the audience will learn:

How to magnify the benefits and minimize the threats of remote work,
1. How we keep our teams connected and flourishing by using lessons from deep social and cognitive science research, and
1. The skills that humans do better than any AI and that we need to nurture, including finding and solving problems, setting strategy for our projects, and communicating.

Set in a framework of stories from teams both rising in success and contending with challenges, the tools and lessons learned come to life.

INTERACTIVE WORKSHOPS FOR TEAMS

How Your Team Works Best Together: Design Your Culture for Maximum Success

Duration: 3 hours

When starting a new project, many teams follow a predictable cadence: They assign tasks and start working. High- performing teams, on the other hand, are more than three times more likely to begin by first discussing how they will work together, paving the way for fewer misunderstandings and smoother collaboration down the road.

But for many technical teams “culture” is a difficult topic (it seems unimportant; they have never seen a culture conversation work before; feels personal and therefore frightening). In this workshop we lean on the social and organizational science that explains why how we do our work is as important to outcomes as the work itself.

Takeaways

What specific kinds of interactions lead to the most successful teams,
Strategies for addressing conflict, and
A sense of how everyone else on the team thinks about team interactions.

Interactions

A pre-workshop survey on team communications,
Breakout groups to walk through conflict scenarios, and
Input from every team member on productive team norms, and an analysis leading to the top norms this team wants for individuals, the team, and the leadership.

This workshop has been held with NASA mission teams and with project teams at universities.

How NASA Teams Solve Problems Before It’s Too Late

Part I: Turn Your Team into a Problem-Finding and Problem-Solving Monster

Duration: 2 hours

The central function of teams is to recognize problems and then find their best solutions. In this workshop we’ll bring the best cognitive and social research to bear on raising your team’s ability to identify problems, bring them to the right people for solution, frame the problems, and then find their best solutions.

Takeaways

Solutions for the top barriers to finding and communicating problems in time to solve them.
The number one characteristic of team culture that enables team problem-solving.
The most effective steps and processes to add to your decision-making process
Know the state of problem-solving in your team

Interactions

A pre-workshop survey on problem-solving practices in your team, and
Real-time data gathering on team challenges.

Part II: Create the Most Productive Decision Meetings

Duration: 2 hours

Framing problems and making decisions, the pivotal moments of teamwork, almost always happen in conversation together, in meetings. But meeting processes and culture are often deeply flawed, and most people don’t know how or don’t feel empowered to get us back on course. In this workshop every person on your team will learn the social and cognitive science behind how each of us can enable our team to make the best possible decisions.

Takeaways

Learn the social science behind the top reasons discussions fail,
Know the state of meeting communications in your team, and
Prepare each person on the team can redirect meetings that are heading for the wrong way.

Interactions

A pre-workshop survey on team functioning,
Co-generation of a toolkit that enables every team member to redirect meetings that are going off-course, and
Breakout group case studies to identify non-optimal processes and develop the confidence to redirect.

These workshops have been held with NASA mission teams and with project teams at universities, including Berkeley.

Mission Ready: How to Build Teams that Perform Under Pressure

Duration: 8 hours, including time for lunch and breaks

Mission Ready provides a blueprint for building strong teams capable of delivering exceptional results in high-pressure situations. No matter their position title, every person in a team can have the influence of a leader: Every team member determines both their own success and the success of the team. Drawing on social science, cognitive science, and organizational science research, Elkins-Tanton gives practical advice on how both individual contributors and leaders can excel. Throughout this workshop participants will assess their own and their team’s strengths and areas where growth is needed and will leave with an action plan. Participants interact in every topic.

Takeaways

Start with the individual: Formulate your own plans on how to level-up on the five individual skills that make you exceptional performer in a team, and plan how to support your teammates or direct reports to level-up as well.
- Network into teams: Analyze your team actions in the role of a leader, regardless of your position, and know how to deploy leadership tools to keep your team performing at its best.
- Become pressure- and crisis-prepared: Construct a plan to move yourself and your team toward peak preparedness, after selecting which of the fifteen skills are the highest-priority skills to attend to first.

Reveal the Biggest Questions: How to Build Fast-Moving Project Teams That Move Your Organization into the Future

Duration: 1.5 to 3 hours, customized to your needs.

This is the moment to reimagine innovation and research, for greatest use of resources, the greatest use of all human minds, and the greatest progress into the most positive possible future. Using this Big Questions process we have started 45 pilot projects over the past eight years, and these teams have yielded an 7x return on our seed investment to date.

No more incremental progress. No more focusing on unimportant goals. In this workshop, we’ll identify the most important questions in your area and set up teams for pilot projects. Together we will:

Collect the most important directions for research and project teams in your organization,
Develop project concepts with small volunteer teams,
Prep these teams for success in pilot projects.

Many private-sector and academic participants, including the Mayo Clinic leadership workshops, the Air Force Academy, the Smithsonian Institution, and SABIC C-suite.

Books

Mission Ready joins these other titles:

Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman by Lindy Elkins-Tanton (William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins, 2022)

My memoir of life as a scientist and exploration on Earth and in space.

Earth by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Linda T. Elkins-Tanton (Bloomsbury, 2017)

“Earth is a magical, unusual, curious book…Cohen and Elkins-Tanton describe is as a ‘little book about an impossibly large subject.’ This subject is made even larger by Cohen and Elkins-Tanton’s forays into discussions of beauty, creativity, and imagination…” – PopMatters

Planetesimals by Linda T. Elkins-Tanton and Benjamin P. Weiss (Cambridge, 2017)

A collection of papers for specialists: “… a host of academic cosmogonists, meteoriticists, Solar System dynamicists, and planetary physicists have collaborated to write 17 review papers. These are collected to form this impressive book, one that is beautifully produced, well-illustrated and an ideal introduction to the topic for a researcher qualified in maths and physics … I recommend this book unreservedly…” – David W. Hughes Source: The Observatory

Volcanism and Global Environmental Change by Schmidt, Fristad, Elkins-Tanton (Cambridge, 2017)

A collection of papers for specialists: “Adding immense value to this book are the abundant references at the end of each chapter. Many excellent and relevant maps, charts, graphs, and photographs appear throughout the text. This volume is an outstanding reference for geologists, volcanologists, geochemists, atmospheric scientists, and environmentalists.” – T. L. T. Grose Source: Choice

The Solar System series by Linda T. Elkins-Tanton (Facts on File 2006, 2010)

The set consists of six books written for general-interest readers at high-school or college level: The Sun, Mercury, and Venus; The Earth and the Moon; Asteroids, Meteorites, and Comets; Mars; Jupiter and Saturn; Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, and the Outer Solar System.