Inside a windowless, three-story habitat at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, four volunteers live and work as if they’re on Mars—cut off from real-time contact with Earth, their messages delayed by up to 20 minutes each way. These simulations inside the Human Exploration Research Analog (HERA) capsule are more than dress rehearsals for space travel—they’re laboratories for human behavior under pressure. Led by Dorothy R. Carter, associate professor at Michigan State University’s Eli Broad College of Business, the Project FUSION team has uncovered a critical ingredient for mission success: collective attention. That is, the ability of teams—both in space and on Earth—to focus on the same problem at the same time, despite communication delays that mimic those expected on a real Mars mission.
As humanity edges closer to interplanetary travel, the technical challenges are matched by human ones. A Mars mission won’t just rely on astronauts; it will demand seamless coordination between crews in space and hundreds of specialists on Earth. “NASA realized the collaboration that a long-duration mission… goes far beyond just the members of the crew on the spacecraft,” Carter explains. Her research, published in Personnel Psychology, is the first to directly link communication delays to team performance through the lens of collective attention.
In the HERA simulations, Carter’s team at MSU’s Kesseler Team Leadership Laboratory acted as Mission Control, managing tasks and responding to emergencies with delayed communication. Using data from these realistic scenarios, they developed a computer model to simulate larger team dynamics. What they found was striking: delays fracture focus. When messages take 10 to 20 minutes to travel each way, it becomes dramatically harder for teams to stay aligned. But interventions can help. The study identified three key strategies—building team members’ task experience (capacity), simplifying communication (clarity), and fostering shared leadership (connectivity)—as vital for maintaining collective attention.
Practical tools are already emerging. Pre-mission trust-building, structured debriefs, clear communication protocols, and knowing each member’s strengths help teams adapt when real-time dialogue isn’t possible. These insights don’t just apply to space. Remote work, disaster response, and global healthcare teams face similar challenges. “Teams should be prepared to think clearly, communicate in simple ways and build strong connections with each other,” Carter said. Her findings offer a blueprint for collaboration across distance and time—proving that even in isolation, humans can stay united in purpose.
As NASA prepares for the next giant leap, the most important technology may not be in the rocket, but in the minds of the people who operate it.