Thinking about the ways Rocky and Grace balance each other out, aside from the whole scientist engineer thing.
Like, despite his big act of cowardice, Grace is usually pretty impulsive. Like the real reason he was the one who needed to go to Tau Ceti (unbeknownst to Stratt) was because there is no way that the original team would have been as uncautious about approaching an alien species.
I'm not saying they would have ignored Rocky, but I'm saying that with the whole planet at stake they probably wouldn't have been as basically trusting, which in turn would have made team work harder, and that team work eventually led to the discovery of Taumoeba.
Stratt's whole reason for bringing Grace onto the project originally was that she knew he had a reputation for coming up with wild new ideas and standing by them, and she needed somebody with that kind of original thinking.
The downside to this, however, is that Grace doesn't tend to think through consequences and will often do self-destructive things on impulse (“staggering waste of carbon”).
Rocky, meanwhile, is actually deceptively cautious.
Like he comes across as very direct and forward at first— making first contact with the alien, moving into his place, going fishing on Adrian, etc— but you gotta think that this is after like multiple decades of not achieving anything.
Not achieving anything because he knew that he didn't have the expertise, while he had more than enough fuel to go back home and knew that his whole planet was at stake.
Grace, I think, would have turned back and asked for help in that situation, and turning back would have been the right thing to do. Like there would have been a huge risk associated— what if whatever kept Rocky safe from the Mystery Space Disease stopped working and then there was nobody left to communicate with Erid or study Tau Ceti?— but realistically the only way they were gonna solve the problem was by figuring out what went wrong and getting more scientists out there.
(Unrealistically, but fortunately for Rocky, an intelligent alien with super advanced tech came along. But it's not like he could have predicted that!)
Also all of the first contact stuff is very much on Rocky's terms. Rocky sends the first message (which Grace catches with his hands, while Rocky uses a robot). Rocky sets up the tunnel. Like if Grace had been aggressive, Rocky's managing of the situation is such that he wouldn't have been in much danger, and he doesn't actually move into the Hail Mary until he's certain that Grace is harmless.
And both of their major traits are needed to save their planets.
Erid and Earth are saved because Grace figured out how to selectively breed an alien species with no thought whatsoever as to what other traits he might accidentally be breeding in. (And yeah, maybe if he'd thought about it he would have been able to prevent the whole xenonite disaster from happening… but equally he might just have realised how dangerous it was, and how impossible to account for every variable and never done it at all.)
They're also saved because Rocky manages to keep Grace from dying of burnout that whole time, and because he introduces revolutionary new ideas to Grace like “what if we look at the information more slowly and use visual aids to see if we can think of a different way to tackle the problem, rather than just going with our first reaction”.
Rocky alone would have died up there without having achieved a thing.
Grace alone would have died up there because he tried to do an EVA sleep deprived or subjected himself to multiple Gs without putting in any safety precautions (he actually tries to do this in the book. After the Adrian incident revealed why its a bad idea. No Rocky is not thrilled by this).
Only together can they save the stars.
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