A PORTRAIT OF THE SCIENTIST AS A YOUNG WOMAN

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.

Winning a major NASA space exploration contract is an accolade that only two women in history have received—and one of them is Elkins-Tanton. In this enthralling and inspiring book, the author, a renowned geophysicist, shares her experience ascending the field, from her training at MIT to her current position leading the mission to explore the asteroid Psyche. In August 2022, she and her team are scheduled to launch a rocket to begin its 3.4-year trip to Psyche, which may be a piece of one of the first metal cores to form in our solar system and could provide never-before-seen data about how the Earth’s metal core formed. Elkins-Tanton describes the harrowing personal obstacles she overcame, from childhood abuse to cancer, and the sexism she encountered in each of her increasingly high-powered roles—a stark reminder that despite advances in equity, in the eyes of male colleagues, women are often “nothing but a symbol for sex” rather than being seen as “a whole person.” Of course, misogyny is not news; what makes the author’s story so compelling is her unrelenting effort to “make a change in culture, a change in expectation, that causes a change in our subconscious reactions and thus in our implicit bias.” Elkins-Tanton does not limit her scope to harassment, though that is a central concern. She innovated classroom learning and team building to create space for every person to contribute and thrive, an approach that was recognized by NASA’s review board and played a role in the success of the Psyche proposal. Ultimately, she created a matrix to allow for every voice and therefore space to “drive human knowledge farther.”

A fearless, riveting, and galvanizing book from a star in the U.S. space program.