Ms. Clark feels she is well equipped to guide the agency through its growing pains. Her career, which she calls “higgledy-piggledy,” stretches from mining geology to venture capital to banking to becoming the first female chief executive of CSIRO, an Australian scientific research agency. Each one of her positions, she said, has been related in that it turned discovery into economic value — a major objective of most space agencies.

Like many of her colleagues, Ms. Clark retains a childlike wonder at the mysteries of space, especially in Australia’s role in deciphering them. She spoke enthusiastically about witnessing the landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars through the NASA-funded, CSIRO-operated deep space center near Canberra, Australia, when she was CSIRO’s chief executive. She raved about a virtual reality program from a Melbourne-based developer, Opaque Space, that caught the attention of NASA and Boeing Defense.

Her oft-repeated mantra for herself is “just do what’s in front of you.” She’s climbed ladders in her career by tackling one task at a time, a pressure-combatting tactic she has attributed to an experience she had when she was 12. A doctor told her that if she did not get over the debilitating nervousness she was then enduring as a preadolescent, she would never be able to hold a stressful job as an adult. In a sense, she has devoted her life to proving that doctor wrong.

She is not one to let much inconvenience her pursuit of discovery, a trait that ran her into trouble in her early twenties: She was caught working in an underground mine in Western Australia, something that was then against the rules.

“The game was then that if a mines inspector came, you came up to the surface, and as long as they didn’t see you working underground or as long as you weren’t ‘blatantly’ working underground, they would sort of turn a blind eye,” Dr. Clark said. “And I just thought that lacked integrity: ‘This is what I do, and I’m not going to hide from that.’ ”