# Interplanetary Student Nanospacecraft: Development of the LEO Demonstrator ESTCube-2
## 5 Leadership Lessons  
A student satellite project is a place for the team members to grow. Nobody is born a leader, but good leadership is needed. Eventually, we could identify leadership characteristics to develop a project like ours.  
The ESTCube-2 project became complex as a student project that needed to create its own identity, which was a challenge after the success of the ESTCube-1. The ESTCube-1 was the first Estonian satellite. It was considered a success by the nation and by the public. From a technical point of view, the satellite worked as expected, but the payload failed. In this context, ESTCube-2 could not simply be another ESTCube-1. As the objective of ESTCube-2 was new and its size grew three times, the core team initiated the ESTCube-2 project with the expectation to re-design most of the satellite and to make it a new engineering challenge. The ESTCube-1 benefited from a promotional campaign and received strong political support as a solution to prepare the next generation of engineers in Estonia. Then, the ESTCube-2 was believed to receive similar support, and an Estonian Student Satellite Foundation was created to provide the project with a legal entity and to receive funds. The new technical challenges and partnerships increased the project's complexity, hence the need for new resources. A successful fundraising campaign was only possible because of the leadership of the initial core team, and the first donation kick-started the project in 2016.  
As we saw from the fundraising, leadership differs from project management and must come in addition. It means specific skills, and because key people left the project, the project management was progressively losing leadership skills. Without a leader present, endless discussions about the motivations of some parts of the design, a loss of focus on the real stakes, and confusion in the documentation references arose. This resulted in the dilution of responsibilities resulting in weak and rushed design decisions. When the Covid-19 pandemic arose, the leadership situation got worse. Eventually, finding launch funding was successful, and when the core team was granted this opportunity, it rebuilt its confidence and, therefore, its leadership.  
The central stake of the project leaders is to \"sell\" the project. New core team members must be shown that there are more skills to gain than technical know-how, and the industry sector also typically expects more. The motivation must go beyond the study duties for the best of them. We saw that the industry could recognize the best students as highly experienced even before graduation.  
From our team's experience, we assess what leadership should mean in a technical project like ours. We could identify three central soft skills, and these skills have to benefit the team during a two to three-year period of time in everyone's life:  
1. Full-filling high-level technical tasks and management tasks. The legitimacy comes from a field of expertise that is strategic for the project. The confidence level in that field must allow quick and efficient solutions to save the leader's availability.
2. Identifying potential conflicts and assisting in their solution. It can be based on technical aspects but can also come from interpersonal relationships.
3. Finding the next leaders. In the long run, the team has to be renewed. The initial leaders will eventually leave, and the project needs to be prepared for that. The following leaders were identified among the participating students who were willing to lead and take ownership of the tasks.