Houston, We Have a Solution

But traveling to the Moon versus Mars isn’t quite as similar as we might think. For starters, the trip to the moon typically takes three days. To reach Mars will require a round-trip voyage of three years.

Aside from the myriad engineering challenges of executing such a long journey, one of the biggest obstacles to a manned Mars mission is psychological. As Northwestern professor and organizational leadership expert Leslie DeChurch puts it, “How can we build one perfect team that can survive and thrive in a small container for that long, in a totally unprecedented scenario where things will go wrong, with no backup plan?”

Luckily, DeChurch and Noshir Contractor, a professor of management and organizations at Kellogg, have been studying that question together for nearly a decade—by conducting research on Earth-based simulations of long-term spaceflight. These “analog” missions, which can last anywhere from 30 days to 8 months, are designed to subject astronauts to the same social isolation, communication delays, and physical confinement that a real Mars crew would face in space.

“These missions are sealed,” DeChurch says. “They can go over the holidays. They go over kids’ birthdays. There is no break. The only time NASA ever stopped one of their analogs was for Hurricane Harvey.”

Contractor and DeChurch collected a wealth of behavioral data from a dozen analog missions that took place in Houston, Texas, and Moscow, Russia, between 2016 and 2020. The researchers used this data to create computerized predictive models of a crew’s social relationships and shared understanding of tasks.

Together, these models—known as Crew Recommender for Effective Work in Space (CREWS) and Shared Cognitive Architecture for Long-Distance Exploration (SCALE)—have produced a set of best practices for keeping crews from falling apart. It covers everything from leadership structures to relationship repair, while pointing out the five critical markers of effective teamwork:

• Shared cognition (thinking and acting as one);

• Team viability (being able to work together over and over again);

• Leadership dynamics (fluidly claiming and ceding authority);

• Task affect (emotionally gelling with other each other on the job); and

• Hindrance (holding others accountable in productive ways).

With DeChurch and Contractor’s help, NASA is currently building those markers into an interactive dashboard that astronauts could someday use to keep a real-world Mars mission on track. And the researchers are starting to adapt their insights for use in workplaces on Earth.

“The original challenge was to provide NASA with the equivalent of a weather-forecasting model for teams: What will this crew look like tomorrow, the day after, and three months from now?” Contractor says. “What we’re building now is a way to not only predict this ‘weather,’ but preemptively change it—by prescribing things that a team can do to avoid predictions that look ominous.”

Brain fog in space

NASA already knows that maintaining effective teamwork in space is tricky. But even long-duration missions like those conducted on the International Space Station (ISS) have little wisdom to offer a potential Mars expedition. That’s because the ISS isn’t actually that far from Earth.

“The International Space Station is supported by a network of mission-control centers around the world, allowing many aspects of its operation to be handled remotely—though the crew onboard still plays a vital, hands-on role,” says DeChurch.

This near-instant communication means that if anything goes wrong, experts on the ground can rapidly problem-solve on the astronauts’ behalf—a scenario vividly dramatized in the movie Apollo 13. But on a Mars mission, the words “Houston, we have a problem” would take 22 minutes just to arrive back home.

“In the Apollo missions, some people actually said—somewhat cynically—that the astronauts were simply the hands, while mission control was the brain,” says Contractor. But on a Mars mission, “you’re going to have to solve problems on your own.”

A crew’s effectiveness at understanding and coordinating its tasks—being both the hands and the brain, so to speak—is called “shared cognition.”

One of the main findings generated by CREWS and SCALE was about how this shared cognition fares over time: As an isolated mission wears on, a crew actually gets better at performing the tasks it trained for (such as performing repairs or controlling equipment). But the crew’s conceptual performance—“being creative, understanding a problem that you didn’t know you had, thinking about a solution in a way that isn’t in a manual”—degrades over time, says DeChurch. In other words, the collective “hands” of an isolated crew may grow more skilled, but its “brain” gets more foggy.

“This happened over multiple analog missions,” Contractor says. “And that motivated [NASA’s] need to understand how a crew can self-regulate over time, because we’re recognizing this loss of collective cognitive functioning.”

Maintaining viability

The hurdles that teams in space face are also emotional. In the early decades of spaceflight, astronauts were selected for individual performance and expertise. Now, a different attribute has taken prominence at NASA: “plays well with others.”

“We’ve done interviews with astronauts who say that putting people into a confined space, even for a relatively short mission, is the perfect recipe for wanting to kill one another,” Contractor says. “A Mars crew that’s going to be together for three years with no exit strategy has to work well not just once, but again and again and again.” The researchers describe this marker of team relationships as “team viability.”

Conflicts are inevitable, but the researchers found that one of the strongest ways to preserve team viability on a long-haul space mission is to pair crew members together to help them simmer down when they are getting on each other’s nerves. In a case where no personnel reshuffling is possible, even pairing the strained teammates on a new shared task can knit the relationship back together.

“When the model says, ‘On day 110, Leslie and Noshir are not really going to get along,’ we might respond by having them only work on things that they’re both really good at,” Contractor explains. “We know from psychology research that people who are successful together are likely to fix the problems they have.”

Networks and factions

Of course, healthy levels of shared cognition and team viability don’t just happen on their own—they need effective leadership as a scaffold. According to DeChurch and Contractor, space missions require a specific leadership structure that combines military-style chain of command with academic meritocracy.

“Roughly half of the people who join the astronaut corps come through the military, but the other half are scientists,” DeChurch says. “So one of the things that’s important in these space crews is that they let expertise drive who is influential. If I’m the mission commander, but Noshir has the best idea, Noshir steps forward and I step back.”

Under this ideal “leadership dynamic,” multiple people can direct crew activity while linked by a shared sense of purpose. Contractor likens the process to lifting up a fishing net by one of its knots.

“If you pick up one little point in the net, you create a temporary hierarchy—but when you drop it, it easily goes flat again and you can pick up another point,” he says. “That fluidity in leadership means that there could even be multiple points ‘picked up’ at the same time, or different people rotating through leadership roles depending on the nature of the task.”

But even maintaining shared leadership has its pitfalls. On one eight-month-long analog in Russia, an accident early in the mission required one crewmember to be evacuated for medical reasons. Differing interpretations of the event caused the crew to split into competing factions.

Instead of being coordinated, the shared leadership ended up being deeply fragmented. “When those leaders are more adversarial with each other, that’s actually worse than having a hierarchy,” DeChurch says. “It’s exactly what we wouldn’t want to happen on a real space mission.”

Bending the curve

The last two critical characteristics of effective crews, called “task affect” and “hindrance,” concern the emotional aspects of collaboration.

The first, task affect, simply means “knowing that someone is going to be easy to work with,” DeChurch explains. Hindrance, meanwhile, is almost the opposite: “you look at your schedule, see you’re doing a task with this person, and you just go, ‘ugh.’”

Despite their differences, the researchers found that combining these two characteristics into a balanced whole, like yin and yang, can improve a crew’s teamwork.

“Hindrance isn’t always a bad thing,” says Contractor. “Often, [hindrance] has the knack of making you dot your Is and cross your Ts.” In fact, effectively balancing both task affect and hindrance—for example, by working well with your crewmates even when they nitpick you—was the most influential predictor of high team performance overall.

Widespread application

From 2019 to 2024, the researchers worked on building these five critical markers of effective crew dynamics into an interactive dashboard called Tool for Evaluating and Mitigating Space Team Risk (TEAMSTaR) to give astronauts a way to predict and navigate threats to their teamwork.

“It’s a decision-support tool, not a decision-making tool,” Contractor says. “It doesn’t tell them what to do. It lets them build scenarios of what their future performance looks like and then see how certain activities might bend the curve in the days, weeks, and months ahead.”

Contractor and DeChurch are still analyzing their initial TEAMSTaR tests, but the initial results are promising. So far, the main takeaway is that space crews, not mission control, should maintain ownership over the dashboard. “This tool is much more effective for self-regulation, not as something to be imposed on a crew by outside observers,” Contractor says.

And just like other NASA-commissioned technology that went on to find widespread application—like freeze-dried food, cordless drills, and Velcro—versions of TEAMSTaR could someday end up helping teams and companies here on the ground.

“So much of what we do is digitally captured already, which creates similar data to what we gathered during the analog missions,” Contractor says. “Microsoft and other big companies have told us they are already working on building dashboards like TEAMSTaR.” Contractor and DeChurch are also distilling their research into a forthcoming book about how to apply astronaut teamwork lessons to business leadership.

“NASA is very proud of the fact that many of the things that they have developed for space travel have had payoffs down here,” Contractor says. “We hope that CREWS, SCALE, and TEAMSTaR will be the first example of a social-science-based discovery created for space that will also pay dividends back on Earth.”