Mission elapsed time: nine days, one hour, thirty-two minutes and fifteen seconds.

Total distance travelled: 694,481 miles.

They are home.

Re-entry and Splashdown

The crew woke to “Run to the Water” by Live, suited up, strapped in, and ran through their checklists. At 2:53pm EDT, a final eight-second thruster burn nudged Orion onto its precise re-entry corridor. There was less than one degree of margin for error. Wiseman and Glover held up a photograph of Earth they had taken moments after.

At 7:33pm EDT the crew module separated from the European Service Module, the workhorse that had sustained them around the moon and back, and which burned up in the atmosphere as planned. The heat shield was exposed.

Twenty minutes later, Orion hit the upper atmosphere at Mach 33, thirty-three times the speed of sound. Plasma built around the spacecraft and cut all communications as expected, and for six minutes, Mission Control watched a blank screen. The families in the viewing room at Johnson Space Center waited in silence too.

Then the signal returned. The forward bay cover came off and the parachutes (two drogue chutes, then three mains) opened and eventually slowed Orion from 300mph to 20mph.

At 8:07pm EDT, exactly on time, they splashed down into the Pacific Ocean.

Mission Control’s commentator called it “a perfect bull’s-eye splashdown.” From the viewing room, the flight controllers turned to face the families and gave a thumbs-up. I think we all exhaled.

Just under two hours later, all four crew members had been lifted by helicopter to the USS John P. Murtha. Jeremy Hansen was first out, waving with a broad smile. Christina Koch next, waving excitedly. Reid Wiseman was the last to leave Integrity.

Flight Director Rick Henfling said at the press conference: “If you didn’t have anxiety bringing this home, you didn’t have a pulse.”

A Moonshot Mission

Howard Hu, NASA’s Orion Programme Manager, said, “This is the start of a new era of human space exploration.”

Dr Lori Glaze, “So y’all, we did it. We sent four amazing people to the Moon and safely returned them to Earth for the first time in more than 50 years, and that generation now knows what we’re capable of. Welcome to our moonshot.”

This was a test flight. Everyone said so, repeatedly, including the crew. And yet… four human beings travelled 252,756 miles from Earth, further than any person in history, flew around the far side of the moon, watched a solar eclipse from deep space, named a crater after a woman they loved, called their colleagues on the International Space Station across a distance that had never been bridged before, and came home, landing within a mile of their target.

At the press conference, NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya said, “That’s not luck, that’s a thousand people doing their job.”

Thousands of people, thousands of hours of engineering, simulations, procedures, and preparation, compressed into a moment where there was nothing left to do but trust it. The crew trusted the spacecraft. The families trusted NASA. Mission Control trusted the physics.

What Happens to the Crew Now

They are on the ship as I write this, undergoing medical checks. In the next twelve to twenty-four hours they will be back with their families in Houston.

The physical readjustment to gravity will take days: legs that have not felt weight in ten days, a vestibular system that has recalibrated to weightlessness, a cardiovascular system being asked to manage blood pressure upright again. The orthostatic garments they wore during re-entry helped. But the body’s adaptation to space, and back to earth, will take time.

The psychological readjustment will take some time too. These four people have seen something that almost no living human has seen. They have been places that no human has been in over fifty years. The research on returning crews from extreme environments: Antarctic expeditions, long-duration ISS missions, isolated deployments, consistently shows that the return phase has its own challenges. Their brains have been running on heightened alertness for ten days. When that ends, and this extraordinary mission becomes a memory, it can feel disorientating.

NASA knows this. Flight surgeons are with them now, alongside behavioural health specialists who have had a relationship with the crew throughout training and will support them through the coming weeks. In the days and months to come, there will be debriefs, media engagements, and a formal public tour. Each of those serves a purpose beyond the obvious one: telling the story publicly, repeatedly, to audiences who are genuinely moved by it, is one of the ways humans begin to process an experience.

They will also need to transition from a crew, a team, back to an individual. For ten days these four people shared every moment, every meal, every extraordinary sight, with a common purpose. Then they go home to separate houses, separate families, and separate routines.

A Personal Note

I’ve been writing these articles every day of the mission, trying to keep up with the press conferences, the incredible images coming back, and working through the technical details to see what they might be going through psychologically as well.

My parents have listened to every single interview I’ve done, even at 6am, and sent me whatsapps of support and feedback. My husband has entertained our children every time I’ve sat outside in the car to conduct them.

And every evening, we have taken our daughters out for a walk now the evenings are lighter. We all need the fresh air and a chance to talk. Usually, we go to the sports field at the end of the road, where they practise their cartwheels and handstands and handstands into bridges(!), burning off the last of the day’s energy before bed.

On the way home each evening, we have looked up at the sky and thought about where those four astronauts might be. One evening we were late enough to see the moon clearly. To say to my five-year-old and eight-year-old, there are actual people, like you and me, around that moon right now.. and to watch them look up and take that in, has been a truly unforgettable time for our family.

I genuinely hope this mission inspires a new generation. It has certainly reminded this older one of why any of us started caring about space in the first place.

Howard Hu said at the press conference: “To all our new followers, please stay tuned.”

Day 10 of 10 🌙

Sources: NASA Artemis II Flight Day 10 live blog, NASA post-splashdown press conference, Space.com live updates, CBS News live updates, April 10-11 2026.

AT TIME OF WRITING, ARTEMIS II HAS NOT RETURNED.

The crew are asleep, and when they wake, it will be their last day in space. They will not be 200,000 miles away from Earth, or float between their seats in their capsule named Integrity. By this time tomorrow, they will be back on dry land feeling the full weight of their own bodies for the first time in ten days.

But first, they have to get home.

What Happened on Day 9

The crew spent the day reviewing re-entry procedures in detail with the flight control team, going through the exact sequence of what happens tonight, step by step, until it is as familiar as can be.

They completed the final trajectory correction burn, the last of three small firings that have been keeping Orion pointed at precisely the right direction for re-entry. They reconfigured the cabin back to its launch configuration: equipment stowed, seats reinstalled, everything secured.

It is also worth explaining something from Day 8 that was not fully clear at the time. The radiation shelter demonstration was modified and the manual piloting test was cancelled because flight controllers identified an issue with the oxidiser in the propulsion system and wanted to spend the time troubleshooting it while they still had access to the European Service Module data. Tonight, when the crew module separates from the service module, the service module burns up in the atmosphere, so they will not be able to investigate it post-mission. The issue does not affect re-entry, and it is NOT related to the crew’s oxygen supply (there were a lot of questions about this in NASA’s press conference last night!)

What Happens When They Wake Up

The crew will wake early Friday afternoon EDT, suit up, and begin the final configuration of the cabin for re-entry. The orange Orion pressure suits go back on and underneath them, the orthostatic intolerance garments they tested on Day 8 (which I wrote about yesterday) which apply compression to their legs and torso so that when they eventually stand up on a ship in the Pacific, they won’t faint.

Then they strap in, and they wait.

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At approximately 11:53pm BST, Orion hits the upper atmosphere at around 24,000mph. Then, for approximately six minutes, nothing. Plasma builds around the spacecraft and blocks all radio signals. Crew experience a second blackout of the mission, only for 6 minutes this time. We will hold our breath until signal returns.

Then the forward bay cover comes off: the crew will hear it, and they have been told to look forward to that sound, because it means everything is going as planned. Two drogue parachutes deploy, slowing Orion to around 300mph. Then three main parachutes bring it down to approximately 20mph. Here’s a great explanation of the parachute system.

At 1:07am BST Saturday morning, we’ll have splashdown.

What Comes After

Navy divers will approach once the spacecraft is made safe: there is a 120-yard exclusion zone initially, because debris from the forward bay and other components also falls into the ocean and recovery vessels cannot be nearby until it is clear.

Then the hatch opens, the crew are extracted and go onto an inflatable platform called the front porch, and then two helicopters take them to the USS John P. Murtha, which has been at sea since Tuesday.

They’ll have medical checks on the ship, then back to shore, and a flight to Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Flight director Jeff Radian said, “There is no question we will be anxious. We have full confidence. But it would be impossible to say we have no irrational fears.” I thought this was refreshingly honest.

He also signed off to the crew yesterday with “go get some sleep and see you tomorrow.”

Day 9 of 10 🌙

Sources: NASA Artemis II Flight Day 9 blog, NASA final mission status press conference, Fox News live updates, CBC News, April 9 2026.

Trying on the Suits

The music was fitting as the main task of the morning was trying on their orthostatic intolerance garments which are compression suits worn underneath their orange Orion pressure suits during re-entry.

After ten days in microgravity, the human body ‘forgets’ how to manage blood pressure against gravity. The garments are worn underneath the pressure suit during re-entry, applying compression to the lower legs and torso so that by the time the crew step out onto the recovery vessel, the blood is already being pushed back up where it needs to be.

I find it amazing how well the body adapts to space, and I know how much work is put into rehabilitating the crew once they return to Earth. This will give them a head start. They have not felt their own weight in ten days. In less than 48 hours, they will feel 3.9 times it.

What Was Planned, and What Actually Happened

Day 8 was originally scheduled to include two significant test objectives: a radiation shelter demonstration and a repeat of the manual piloting test with Wiseman and Glover at the controls. Neither happened as planned.

The radiation shelter demonstration was modified. Rather than the full procedure of moving stowage to build a protective zone, the crew focused specifically on ventilation and airflow within the shelter space. In microgravity there is no convection to move air around, which means carbon dioxide can silently build up around the face without the crew noticing. Testing whether the suit umbilical system could maintain proper airflow in a confined space turned out to be the more important question they wanted answered.

The manual piloting demonstration was cancelled by flight controllers entirely. No reason was given publicly. Given that Koch and Hansen had already completed it on Day 4, and given that tomorrow’s schedule is lighter, it may simply have been a question of priorities.

The Press Conference

At 10:45pm EDT the crew took questions from journalists in their final media appearance of the mission. Victor Glover, looking back at Earth from 150,000 miles away, said: “It doesn’t change it, it absolutely reaffirms that we live on a fragile planet in the vacuum of space. It’s almost like seeing living proof.”

Christina Koch, on life inside Orion: “Yes, it feels bigger in microgravity, and yes, we are bumping into each other 100% of the time.”

One More Burn

The day ended with the second trajectory correction burn: 15 seconds, a change in velocity of 1.6 feet per second, monitored by Koch and Hansen.

Tomorrow

Day 9 is the last full day in space. The crew will review re-entry procedures, complete the final trajectory correction burn, and begin configuring the cabin for splashdown. Wiseman and Glover may complete the manual piloting demonstration that was cancelled today.

One more sleep. Then they come home.

Day 8 of 10 🌙

Sources: NASA Artemis II Flight Day 8 blog, ABC News live updates, Fox News live updates, CBC News, Space Scout (OCSS engineer Heidi Clark), April 8 2026.

The Science Debrief

Before Orion travelled too far from the moon, the crew joined Dr Kelsey Young’s lunar science team for a debrief, gathering the crew’s impressions while Monday’s flyby was still completely fresh in their minds.

This timing is deliberate and really important. Memory of a novel visual experience is most vivid and most detailed immediately after the event. The science team wanted the crew’s raw, unprocessed impressions of what they saw: the colour variations, the textures, the features that caught their eye in ways that might not show up in the photographs, before the detail begins to fade and simplify in the way all memories eventually do. Our memories are notoriously inaccurate.

The science team described themselves as having been “absolutely buzzing” throughout the flyby, analysing the crew’s real-time observations from the Science Evaluation Room in Houston. If you watched any of the lunar fly-by on Monday night you will have heard the continuous observations by crew and comms from ground. Excellent teamwork and also exhausting on both sides to be that meticulous and in constant communication during their observation of 7 hours (minus the 40 minute comms blackout).

A Call Across Space

The crew then made a 15-minute audio call to the astronauts currently aboard the International Space Station: NASA’s Jessica Meir, Jack Hathaway and Chris Williams, and ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot (who I taught in 2023).

This is a first in human spaceflight. Never before have humans beyond low Earth orbit spoken directly with humans in low Earth orbit. The data travelled from Orion through the Deep Space Network to JPL in Pasadena, then to Houston, and back out to the ISS. This was a particular highlight for both crews and you can hear it in their voices:

Jessica Meir (on the ISS) to the Artemis crew: “We can tell that you guys are definitely experiencing ‘moon joy.’ I feel like even we are experiencing ‘moon joy’ right now.”

Wiseman to the ISS crew: “We have been waiting for this like you can’t imagine.”

Koch to the ISS crew: “Every single thing that we learned on ISS is up here.” For Koch and Meir specifically, it was a space reunion as the two had been together on the ISS in January 2020 and done a spacewalk together.

Time Off (sort of)

Following the debrief, the crew had staggered off-duty periods, giving them time to rest and recharge before the final tasks of the mission.

What does time off look like in space 200,000 miles from home? NASA did not report much, which is appropriate for a crew that has been under 24/7 scrutiny for the last 7 days. These are private hours in an extraordinary place. What we know is that the crew have tablets loaded for the mission, and on the ISS these are normally loaded with films, music and books.

The research on crews that go to extreme environment agrees on this: unstructured time after a peak experience is not always restful. With the scaffolding of the mission absent for a time, but with so much more still to come, it will be hard for them to truly relax.

One Trajectory Correction

The day concluded with a 15-second trajectory correction burn: the first of three that will refine Orion’s path back to Earth. Fifteen seconds of engine firing to keep them pointed precisely at a Pacific Ocean splashdown zone for Friday.

Tomorrow

Day 8 is a working day. The crew will conduct a radiation shelter demonstration (building a protective zone inside Orion against a potential solar flare) and repeat the manual piloting test that Koch and Hansen completed on Day 4, this time with Wiseman and Glover at the controls.

Two days after that, they come home.

Day 7 of 10 🌙

Sources: NASA Artemis II Flight Day 7 blog, Canadian Space Agency daily logbook, NPR, April 7 2026.

I have spent this week on BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio 5 Live, BBC News television, and Sky News talking about what this mission means: the human performance behind it, the psychology, and the training. But last night I was just me on my sofa, watching history, with my phone full of messages from friends who were doing exactly the same thing.

What happened

At 1:57pm EDT, the crew broke the human distance record, surpassing Apollo 13’s mark of 248,655 miles from Earth, a record that had stood since 1970. At maximum distance they were 252,760 miles from home, further than any human in history.

As Orion travelled behind the moon, the crew witnessed Earthset (see image), the moment Earth dropped below the lunar horizon.

At 6:44pm EDT, all contact was lost in a planned blackout. For approximately 40 minutes, Mission Control had nothing: no voice, no data, no vital signs, and none of those images of the moon.

Orion reached its closest approach to the moon at just after 7pm EDT, 4,067 miles above the surface, before looping around the far side and beginning its return to Earth.

When Orion emerged from behind the moon, the crew witnessed Earthrise, Earth coming back into view from the opposite edge of the moon, moments before the Deep Space Network reacquired the signal and communications were restored.

Then came the solar eclipse. From 8:35pm EDT, Orion, the moon and the sun aligned. The crew watched the sun disappear behind a darkened moon for nearly an hour, studying the solar corona.

In their own words

Glover, on the eclipse said “It’s truly hard to describe. It is amazing.” Wiseman added simply: “It’s indescribable.”

During the flyby, the crew named a crater on the boundary of the near and far side after Reid Wiseman’s late wife, Carroll, who died in 2020 after a five-year battle with cancer. Hansen announced it, visibly emotional: “We lost a loved one. Her name was Carroll. The spouse of Reid, the mother of Katie and Ellie.”

The crew shared a group hug afterwards. They also named a second crater Integrity, after their spacecraft.

The comms blackout

I spent much of this week talking about the 41-minute communications blackout as one of the most psychologically significant moments of the mission. Then Victor Glover described it as “quite nice.” The crew were so absorbed in their task and focused on their observations of the far side, that 41 minutes of total silence 252,000 miles from Earth was a small relief.

For mission designers planning for Mars, where that silence will be the permanent condition rather than a 41-minute exception, this is certainly interesting.

The problem-solvers

As you can see in the image above, they take images whilst using a camera shroud, which is essentially a curtain with a hole for the lens to pass through. It is used to prevent light from the cabin from reflecting on the windowpanes.

But at some point during the lunar observations, Glover was also struggling to see clearly because his eyes needed to adjust from the brightness of the moon outside to the relative darkness inside the cabin. The solution was to cover the window with a T-shirt. The T-shirt, the Velcro that keeps everything in one place in microgravity, the workarounds for the toilet that has now broken twice during this mission. These are the moments that reveal the human problem solvers behind this mission.

Homebound

Christina Koch told NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman: “I’m not ready to go home. I can’t believe that something this cramped of quarters can fly by and still be fun every single minute.” After 328 days on the ISS, two winters in Antarctica, and now the furthest any woman has been from Earth, Koch is not done yet.

The crew are heading back to Earth. Splashdown is Friday 10 April, approximately 8pm EDT, which is 1am BST on Saturday, in the Pacific Ocean off San Diego.

Three more days of space travel, and then re-entry at 25,000mph through an atmosphere that will heat the heat shield to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, followed by parachutes and the Pacific Ocean.

Day 6 of 10 🌙

Sources: NASA Artemis II live blog, ABC News, CNN, NBC News, NPR

It is Easter Monday. This morning I was on BBC News at 9am. This evening I was on Sky News. In between, I hunted for Easter eggs with my daughters. And tonight, whilst most of the UK sleeps, four astronauts will pass behind the far side of the moon.

Where they are right now

At 12:37am EDT (5:37am BST) this morning, Orion entered the lunar sphere of influence, the point at which the moon’s gravitational pull became stronger than Earth’s. About an hour later, Christina Koch radioed back to Mission Control: “We are now falling to the Moon rather than rising away from Earth. It is an amazing milestone!”

The distance record should be broken at 1:56pm EDT (6:56pm BST) today, the crew will surpass Apollo 13’s record of 248,655 miles from Earth, set in 1970. They will reach their maximum distance of 252,760 miles at 7:07pm EDT (12:07am BST). Further from home than any human in history.

This morning the crew woke to a recorded message from Jim Lovell, commander of Apollo 13, the last crew to travel this far, who recorded it shortly before his death last year aged 97. “It’s a historic day, and how busy you’ll be,” he told them. “But don’t forget to enjoy the view. Good luck and Godspeed from all of us here on the good Earth.”

What are they doing? And why?

The lunar observation window opens at 2:45pm EDT (7:45pm BST). The crew are working in pairs, rotating roughly every hour. One astronaut photographs while the other gives naked-eye verbal descriptions of surface features, recorded through a tablet-based Lunar Targeting Plan app. They should take thousands of photographs during the seven-hour window.

We have robotic probes, orbiters, and decades of satellite imagery of the moon. So why send human eyes?

Because human visual perception is genuinely different. The brain is extraordinarily sensitive to subtle variations in colour, texture and shadow that cameras can miss. Harrison Schmitt on Apollo 17 spotted orange-coloured dust on the lunar surface that turned out to be evidence of ancient volcanic activity, something a trained geologist’s eye caught in real time that might have been dismissed in a photograph.

Already, before the formal flyby window even opened, Koch was looking at the moon through a 400mm lens and noticed something: “The darker parts just aren’t quite in the right place. Something about you senses that is not the moon that I’m used to seeing.”

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Trained for exactly this

Here is where it gets personal for me.

Three of the four crew members on Artemis II have done analogue missions, the kind of extreme environment I helped prepare astronauts for. These are not simulations in a classroom. They are real deployments, in genuinely hostile environments, designed to expose the human and operational limits that space will test.

Jeremy Hansen spent six days underground in a cave system in Sardinia in 2013, as part of ESA’s CAVES programme, six days in darkness, with a multinational crew, practising the teamwork, communication, leadership and problem-solving that space demands. He then spent seven days living in the Aquarius underwater laboratory off the coast of Florida in 2014, as part of NASA’s NEEMO programme simulating the isolation, confinement and operational pressure of spaceflight.

Reid Wiseman also did NEEMO, commanding a mission in 2016 living and working underwater, leading a crew in an environment where the consequences of error are real.

From 2004 to 2007, Christina Koch spent time deployed in the Arctic and Antarctic regions, including a full winter-over at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, months without seeing the sun, with the same small crew, cut off from the outside world, in temperatures reaching minus 79 degrees Celsius.

She described it herself: “The isolation, absence of family and friends, and lack of new sensory inputs are all conditions that you must find a strategy to thrive within.”

I have worked with Antarctic crews going to the Concordia base. I have seen what a winter-over does to the human mind and to a team. The fact that Koch has lived through that, and then spent 328 days on the ISS, and is now here, further from Earth than any woman in history tells you something about who she is.

Tonight, when the comms blackout hits and Mission Control goes silent, these are not people encountering isolation and confinement for the first time. They have been here before, in different forms, and they found strategies to thrive. That is what the Human Behaviour and Performance training is for.

Tonight’s Timeline (all BST, all approximate!)

7:45pm: Lunar observation window opens.

11:44pm: Communications blackout begins. 40 minutes of total silence.

Midnight: Closest approach. 4,070 miles above the lunar surface.

12:07am Tuesday: Maximum distance from Earth. 252,760 miles.

12:25am: Earthrise. Earth reappears above the lunar horizon. Communications restored.

1:35am–2:32am: Solar eclipse. The sun passes behind the moon. The corona appears.

Please double check times - they keep changing slightly and I keep trying to convert EDT to BST, so forgive me!

Watch Live

NASA’s coverage is streaming on YouTube, NASA+, and most major streaming platforms. Search “NASA Artemis II.”

Day 6 of 10 🌙

Sources: NASA mission blog, ABC News, NBC News, Wikipedia crew biographies, April 6 2026.

Days 4 and 5 is all about preparation for the most significant day of the mission: Monday’s lunar flyby.

What they are actually doing

Saturday included a 24-hour acoustics test to help engineers characterise the sound environment inside the spacecraft.

Koch and Hansen took turns manually controlling the spacecraft for 41 minutes, testing two different thruster modes to give engineers more data about Orion’s piloting capabilities in deep space. Wiseman and Glover will repeat the same demonstration on Day 8 on the return journey, to give the ground teams as many perspectives as possible.

The crew also reviewed the lunar targeting plan: the list of surface features the science team has asked them to photograph and analyse during their six-hour flyby on Monday.

On Sunday, the crew have crossed what NASA calls the lunar sphere of influence. This is the point in space where the moon’s gravitational pull becomes stronger than Earth’s. Up until this point, Earth has been the dominant force acting on Orion. Beyond it, the moon takes over. They are now, gravitationally speaking, closer to the moon than to home.

Chilly

Victor Glover mentioned that the temperature inside Orion is quite chilly, so much so that he wished they had brought different sleeping bags. Mission Control is working with the crew to warm up the cabin! 🥶

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Looking back

On Thursday evening, Mission Control reoriented the spacecraft as the sun was setting behind the Earth. Wiseman described what they saw: “I don’t know what we all expected to see at that moment, but you could see the entire globe, from pole to pole. You could see Africa, Europe, and if you looked really close, you could see the northern lights. It was the most spectacular moment, and it paused all four of us in our tracks.”

By Days 4 and 5, that view has changed. Earth is smaller. The moon is growing.

Christina Koch, looking back at Earth through Orion’s window on Saturday, described what she saw to Mission Control. She could make out entire coastlines of continents and the South Pole, her old stomping ground from her Antarctic research days.

The sound of silence

Throughout this mission, everything travels through a link between Orion and Earth. Not just voice but the crew’s vital signs, Orion’s systems data, photographs, video, flight plans, and updates from Mission Control all travel through NASA’s Deep Space Network. This is a system of three enormous antenna complexes positioned around the world in California, Spain and Australia. Each dish is roughly the size of two-thirds of a football field.

The geographic spread means that as Earth rotates, at least one dish always has a line of sight to Orion. The crew have continuous contact with Mission Control for almost the entire mission.

Artemis II is also testing a laser-based communications system called O2O, which is capable of transmitting data at up to 260 megabits per second, fast enough to send 4K video from the moon. Compare that to Apollo, which sent back the famously grainy footage of the first moonwalk using radio technology.

At the moon’s distance, even radio signals travelling at the speed of light take approximately 1.3 seconds each way, a round trip of about 2.6 seconds. If you were having a conversation, this would be a little like a delayed satellite phone call, but manageable. It is a preview of what communication will feel like as we go further. Every kilometre from Earth, that delay grows. On a Mars mission, it would be 40 minutes each way.

As Orion passes behind the far side of the moon on Monday, the moon itself acts as a physical barrier to all radio signals. There will be no voice, no video, no telemetry, no data on the crew or spacecraft. Nothing. Both the radio system and the new laser system are blocked because both require a line of sight to Earth that the moon will physically obstruct.

This blackout is expected to last approximately 41 minutes (point 6 on the map above)

Inside Orion, four people will be completely alone, further from Earth than any human in history, in total communications silence, passing over terrain no human eye has seen, with the sun disappearing behind the moon in a total solar eclipse.

Tomorrow

The lunar flyby observation period begins at 2:45pm EDT on Monday (7:45pm BST), when Orion’s main cabin windows will be pointed toward the Moon.

At approximately 5:47pm EDT (10:47pm BST), the communications blackout begins: 41 minutes of total silence as the crew pass behind the far side.

When they re-emerge, at approximately 7:02pm EDT (midnight BST), Orion reaches its closest approach to the lunar surface: 4,066 miles above it. Three minutes later, at 7:05pm EDT, the crew break the human distance record, reaching 252,757 miles from Earth, surpassing Apollo 13’s record set in 1970 by 4,102 miles.

Follow along tomorrow for Day 6: the lunar flyby, the far side, the blackout, the record, and the solar eclipse. It’s going to be the most exciting day!

Days 4 & 5 of 10 🌙

Crew quotes drawn from NASA mission blogs, downlink footage and CNN mission coverage, April 4-5 2026.

NASA’s Lori Glaze confirmed at a press conference afterwards that the burn was “flawless.” “From this point forward,” she said, “the laws of orbital mechanics are going to carry our crew to the moon, around the far side and back to Earth.”

Commander Reid Wiseman, speaking to the world from inside Orion shortly afterwards, put it simply: “We have been to the moon before in 1968 through 1972. It’s been a long time since we’ve been back. And I’ve got to tell you, there is nothing normal about this.”

He added: “Sending four humans 250,000 miles away is a herculean effort, and we are now just realising the gravity of that.”

📺 Nothing normal about this either! I was on BBC News this morning to talk about it.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/l00584q9/astronauts-leave-earths-orbit-on-artemis-ii-mission

(I’m at minute 07:00 but the whole episode is well worth watching)

The True Point of No Return

I wrote on Day 1 about the psychology of launch. But this is not the true point of no return because you can abort at launch. You can also come home from Earth orbit within hours if something goes wrong.

The translunar injection burn is different. After it, the fastest way home is around the moon and back. There are contingency abort options, but none of them are quick. The crew are committed in a way they simply were not before.

What the Body Is Doing

By Day 3, the crew are likely just emerging from one of the less glamorous aspects of spaceflight: space adaptation syndrome. In the first 48 to 72 hours in microgravity, the body undergoes a significant adjustment. Fluid shifts upward toward the head, creating a sensation similar to a head cold. The inner ear, deprived of gravity’s familiar cues, sends confused signals. Nausea, headaches and disorientation are common, affecting up to 70% of astronauts in the early days of a mission.

It passes, but it can affect concentration, appetite, mood, sleep. The crew have been working through it while simultaneously running systems checks, conducting proximity operations demonstrations, exercising, and sleeping in 4-hour shifts.

By this morning, the worst of it should be behind them as the body adapts quickly.

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Glued to the Window

The crew held their first video call back to Earth. It gave us a glimpse of what they are experiencing.

Jeremy Hansen, on his first ever spaceflight, reported that the crew “couldn’t get to lunch because we’re glued to the window.”

Christina Koch, who has seen Earth from the ISS before, described being completely unprepared for the emotional impact of seeing it from this distance. “I knew that that is what we would see. But there’s nothing that prepares you for the breathtaking aspect of seeing your home planet both lit up bright as day and also the moon glow on it at night, with the beautiful beam of the sunset.”

This is the beginning of the overview effect, a profound shift in perspective that astronauts consistently describe after seeing Earth from space. From the ISS, Earth fills the window. From here, it is becoming smaller every day.

What Today Looks Like

By Day 3, the adrenaline is fading. The routine of deep space travel is setting in: exercise, meals, trajectory correction burns, communications checks. The extraordinary is becoming the everyday.

Day 3 is relatively quiet by the standards of the first two days. The crew will carry out a small trajectory correction burn to keep Orion precisely on course. There is a communications test through the Deep Space Network and a CPR demonstration.

It is also, if they can tear themselves away from the window, a day to begin acclimatising to the reality of deep space travel. They are roughly one day into a four-day journey to the moon. Earth is getting smaller. The moon is getting larger.

On Day 6, they are going to witness something extraordinary. They are going to fly directly into the moon’s shadow and witness a total solar eclipse. The sun’s corona (its outer atmosphere, usually invisible) will be fully visible. No human has ever seen it from here.

That is three days away.

Follow along tomorrow for Day 4 as the crew continue their outbound journey, what does their space routine look like?

Day 3 of 10 🌙

Crew quotes are drawn from NASA downlink footage and press conference reports via ABC News, CNN, Houston Public Media and Fox News, 2 April 2026.

They have been awake since early morning Florida time. They watched the Earth fall away beneath them. They tested the toilet which briefly malfunctioned before being fixed! They rearranged their floating home, converting Orion from a launch vehicle into a living and working space for four people. They checked the water dispenser, the carbon dioxide removal system, the life support. They took off their orange pressure suits for the first time and changed into regular clothes. They ate. They looked out of the window at the planet they have just left.

After about eight and a half hours in space, they tried to sleep. They got four hours before they were woken up (Mission Control played “Sleepyhead” by Young & Sick) to monitor an engine burn that adjusted Orion’s orbital geometry. Then, if they were lucky, another four and a half hours.

Welcome to Day 2.

The Toilet

Before launch, Commander Reid Wiseman listed the things they needed to verify on Day 1 before committing to the moon: “Can it scrub our carbon dioxide? Can it keep us alive? Can we drink water? Can we go to the bathroom? All those basic human functions that we did not test on Artemis I.”

The toilet malfunctioned, but it was fixed, and the mission continued.

This is precisely why they spend an entire day in Earth orbit before heading to the moon, to test everything that matters. The technical term is ‘systems checkout’. In practice it means verifying that every system on board works before they commit to a journey of 384,000km.

Leaving Earth Behind

Later today, Orion’s main engine, part of the European Service Module built by Airbus on behalf of ESA, will fire for the translunar injection burn. This is the true point of no return: a burn lasting just over six minutes that commits the spacecraft to its trajectory around the moon.

As I write this article, the crew are asleep ahead of it.

After this burn, the crew are on a free-return trajectory. The moon’s gravity will swing them around the far side and sling them back to Earth without needing to fire the engines again.

Before the burn, Christina Koch will spend her morning setting up Orion’s systems to perform it. Wiseman and Glover will have already been up exercising. Then they strap in for the translunar injection burn, and will be on on their way to the moon.

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Why Are They Exercising on Day 2?

In microgravity, the body has no gravitational load to push against. Muscles and bones begin to deteriorate almost immediately. On a ten-day mission this is less critical than on a six-month ISS stay, but the process begins from the moment of launch. Exercise is the primary countermeasure.

The workout also serves a second purpose. It stress-tests Orion’s life support systems. Four people exercising vigorously increases carbon dioxide output, raises oxygen demand, and generates heat. If the life support handles that before they leave Earth orbit, NASA has greater confidence in these systems.

How do they sleep?

Last night, after launch, the Artemis II crew slept in four-hour broken shifts on hammocks in a shared space. There are no private sleeping quarters (unlike on the ISS). There is constant noise, the hum of life support systems, the presence of three other people, and the sounds of a working spacecraft.

Research from Space Shuttle and ISS missions (published in The Lancet following the largest sleep study ever conducted in space) found that 78% of shuttle crew reported taking sleep medication including Ambien on more than half the nights they spent in space, and 75% of ISS crew reported using medication at some point.

NASA schedules 8.5 hours of sleep per night for astronauts on the ISS, but on average they get about six even with medication, building a sleep deficit from the very first night.

Weightlessness disrupts the proprioceptive system, the body’s sense of orientation that normally helps us feel settled enough to sleep deeply. Noise, temperature fluctuations, and unfamiliar light cycles compound the problem further.

NASA classifies sleep deficiency and circadian rhythm disorders as Category 1 risks for long-duration spaceflight, their highest risk classification.

Whether the Artemis II crew are using sleep medication specifically, I can’t say. NASA does not publicise individual medication use on active missions. But given what we know from decades of spaceflight research, the broken four-hour shifts, the shared space, and the general noise of the spacecraft, sleep on Artemis II is unlikely to be straightforward.

What happens next?

Following the translunar injection burn, the crew have a lighter day. They have an opportunity for a video call back to Earth, the first of several planned throughout the mission. They begin to acclimatise to the space environment and they start the four-day journey to the moon.

Follow along tomorrow for Day 3, as the crew leave Earth’s gravity behind and begin the journey to the moon, what happens psychologically when home starts to disappear?

Day 2 of 10 🌙

Research cited in this article is drawn from studies published in The Lancet Neurology. Crew quotes are from pre-mission interviews with Space.com, NASA podcasts, and CBS News.

I cannot speak for them, but after years training astronauts at the European Space Agency, I have a fairly good sense of what is going on inside that capsule right now. And helpfully, they have been remarkably candid in interviews over the last few weeks. Their words give us a real insight into how they are feeling, and how they have prepared (technically and mentally) for today.

A reminder of the crew…

Reid Wiseman, Commander Previously spent 165 days on the ISS. Former Chief of the NASA Astronaut Office.

Victor Glover, Pilot 168 days on the ISS as pilot of the first SpaceX Crew Dragon operational mission.

Christina Koch, Mission Specialist 328 days on the ISS, the record for the most consecutive days in space by a woman.

Jeremy Hansen, Mission Specialist Canadian Air Force fighter pilot. This is his first spaceflight.

Let’s start with the Commander. Reid Wiseman arrived at Kennedy Space Center last Thursday and stepped off the plane with the energy of someone who has been waiting a very long time for this. “Hey, let’s go to the moon!” he exclaimed on the runway, pumping his fists. “I think the nation and the world has been waiting a long time to do this again. We are really pumped.”

Christina Koch, the most experienced astronaut on the crew, brought a different perspective to her pre-launch reflections. “It feels like an incredible privilege and responsibility,” she said. She compared the preparation for this mission to her previous training for the ISS: “For the International Space Station, the training program is very much optimised. Many people have done it before and it’s a well-oiled machine. For this mission, we’re going to be writing the book as we go. It’s our responsibility to do things that aren’t necessarily already written out in a book.”

Victor Glover’s answer when asked about his excitement ahead of launch was particularly revealing. “Excitement is something I get asked about a lot and I don’t let that out often. I think it can become a distraction.” He elaborated elsewhere: “I’m very protective of my emotional well-being and my mental bandwidth. I like to simplify. A great leader is a great simplifier.”

Before every launch, Glover listens to two songs from the Apollo era: Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon” and Marvin Gaye’s “Make Me Wanna Holler”, songs that he says “capture what we did well, what we did poorly.”

Jeremy Hansen, the Canadian fighter pilot making his very first spaceflight, described the final countdown, “In some moments I’m super-excited and I’m thinking, wow, this is coming. And then the next moment I’m like, wow, I’ve got to really get to work. Time is running out and we still have work to do.”

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Four people. Four different responses to the same extraordinary moment. Because there is no single correct way to emotionally prepare for something like this. All we can do is give them the technical knowledge, procedures and support, and the psychological preparation. What they each bring to the moment: their self-awareness, and their ability to manage themselves under pressure, is entirely their own.

What none of them are doing is pretending the risk doesn’t exist. As Hansen put it before launch: “We’re going to take some appropriate risks, and we’re going to accomplish some extraordinary things. We’re going to have some failures, some setbacks along the way, and then we’re going to pick ourselves back up and keep going.”

Glover put it even more precisely: “As astronauts, we’re going to work really hard to learn things that are quite complex, but at the end of the day, there is also value in appreciating the unknown. There’s no way to prepare for it. We have to be prepared to be unprepared.”

I love this last line. I spent years at ESA training astronauts for moments like this. What we were always working towards was not the elimination of fear or excitement or even the pressure of responsibility. It was the ability to feel all of those things fully, to know that you are as prepared as you will ever be, and to know that you are also prepared for the unknown.

In a NASA video recorded before launch, each astronaut distilled the mission into a single phrase. “We are ready,” says Koch. “We are going,” adds Hansen. “To the Moon,” says Glover. Wiseman completes the sentence: “For all humanity.”

Follow along tomorrow for Day 2: why what happens in the next 24 hours, before they even head to the moon, is such an important part of the whole mission.

Day 1 of 10 🌙

Quotes in this article are from interviews with the Artemis II crew given to Space.com, CNN, National Geographic, NASA’s Houston We Have a Podcast, and CBS News in 2025-2026.

Twenty minutes later I was live on Radio 4’s Today Programme, talking about astronaut psychology to several million people before most of them had finished their breakfast.

The reason they called was Artemis II. NASA’s first crewed mission to the moon in over 50 years. Four astronauts, a rocket the height of a 30-storey building, and a journey that will take them further from Earth than any human has been since 1972.

It launches this Wednesday 2 April 2026.

I spent four years at ESA’s European Astronaut Centre training astronauts, working on the human behaviour and performance side of what it takes to send people into space and bring them back well.

Here’s what I told the BBC: the engineering of this mission is extraordinary, but the human performance challenge is just as remarkable. Maybe even more so, but I’m biased.

🎙️ You can hear my BBC Radio 4 Today Programme interview here at 1h24m

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002tbc0

Or listen to the clip below.

This is the story I didn’t have time to tell in full on radio.

The Mission: What’s Actually Happening?

Artemis II launches on Wednesday 2 April at 11:24pm UK time from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Four astronauts will climb into a capsule called Orion, roughly the size of a camper van, and spend 10 days travelling to the moon, looping around its far side, and returning to Earth.

They won’t be landing, this is a flyby, not a touchdown. But don’t let that diminish what it is.

Astronauts have been travelling to the ISS for over 25 years. It orbits just 400km above Earth and is reachable in as little as 6 hours. Artemis II will loop around the moon 384,000km away. 1,000 times further. Four days out, a day looping around the far side, four days back.

At their furthest point, they will be over 400,000km from Earth, potentially breaking the record for the furthest any human has ever been, currently held by the Apollo 13 crew in 1970.

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The Crew: Who Are These Four People?

One of the first things the BBC asked me was whether the crew had flown before. It’s a great question.

Reid Wiseman (Commander) is a US Navy test pilot with 165 days on the ISS under his belt and former Chief of the NASA Astronaut Office. Calm and methodical, the kind of person you want in charge.

Victor Glover (Pilot) is also a naval test pilot who flew the SpaceX Crew-1 mission to the ISS in 2020. Before launch he said something that interested me: “Excitement is something I get asked about a lot — and I don’t let it out often. I think it can become a distraction.”

Christina Koch (Mission Specialist) is an electrical engineer who spent 328 days on the ISS, a record for the most consecutive days in space by a woman. She also did field research in Antarctica before becoming an astronaut. She will be the first woman to travel to the moon.

Jeremy Hansen (Mission Specialist) is a Canadian Air Force fighter pilot and this will be his first spaceflight. Most first-time astronauts go to the ISS, 400km up! Hansen’s first trip to space will take him 1,000 times further than that. He is the first non-American to travel to the moon.

Three highly experienced astronauts and one first-timer going further than almost anyone in history.

Compare them to the Apollo crews who were almost exclusively white American male test pilots, selected in an era where “the right stuff” meant a very specific type of person. The Artemis crew has the same technical rigour but a completely different human profile. More diverse in background, in nationality, and in experience. The research on team performance tells us that cognitive diversity under pressure produces better decisions.

The Spacecraft: Life in a Camper Van

Orion’s habitable volume is around 9 cubic metres, roughly the size of a large garden shed. Four people will sleep, eat, exercise, work and live in that space for 10 days.

Compare that to the ISS, which has around 915 cubic metres of pressurised volume, the equivalent of a six-bedroom house. Astronauts on the ISS have private sleeping quarters, dedicated laboratories, a cupola with views of Earth. There are spaces to decompress, to be alone with your thoughts, to get away for five minutes.

On Orion there is nowhere to go.

There are hammocks instead of sleeping quarters. Everything happens in the same shared space. The noise, the light, the physical presence of three other human beings will be constant and inescapable for 10 days.

This is not a complaint about the design, it’s an engineering necessity. But it’s worth understanding what that environment does to people, because the psychological challenges of this mission begin long before they reach the moon.

10 Days, 10 Psychological Challenges

Starting Wednesday at launch, I’ll be publishing one article a day for 10 days, each one tracking where the crew actually are in the mission, and exploring one psychological challenge or insight drawn from my years training astronauts at ESA.

Follow this series so you don’t miss a day.

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But what kind of man was Yuri? Brave? Courageous? A serious risk taker?

Six decades of human spaceflight since Yuri’s flight have taught us a lot about what great human performance looks like. The characteristics and performance we require from our astronauts have changed and evolved over those years depending on the mission, the technology, and the hard lessons learned.

I spent years training ESA astronauts in human behaviour and performance. So I’m going to give you the quickest rundown of human performance in spaceflight from the last 60 years, and why it matters to you now. I’ll dive deeper into each of these missions in future articles, but for now, let’s go!

The first NASA astronauts for the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo missions were military test pilots. Selected for individual technical mastery, physical toughness, and nerve. These were short missions, in untested technology, doing things no human had ever done. What we needed was someone who could hold it together alone, make split second decisions, and not crack under extreme physical and psychological stress.

Then came the Shuttle era. Larger crews, longer missions, more complexity. It was clear that how people worked together mattered as much as individual capability. The Challenger disaster in 1986 made that painfully clear. The engineers had raised concerns about launching in cold temperatures multiple times over the years leading up to Challenger. They specifically objected the night before, because temperatures were forecast to be below freezing, but they couldn’t make their case to management.

Seven people died. The investigation showed the technical failure came after a human one. Communication and speaking up became central to astronaut and ground control training.

Then came the International Space Station (ISS). These are six month missions on average, living and working with people from different countries, different cultures, different agencies. We have NASA, ESA (Europe), Roscosmos (Russia), JAXA (Japan), CSA (Canada) all working together. Psychological resilience, cultural adaptability, and resolving disagreements in isolation became mission critical.

The question shifted from ‘can you fly the spacecraft?’ to ‘can you also live and work productively with this crew for months at a time?’.

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One of the most striking examples of how that training was put into practice was Luca Parmitano, an Italian ESA astronaut who, during a spacewalk, found his helmet slowly filling with water. He was struggling to hear, see, and breathe. He had to stay calm, work the problem, and navigate his way back to the airlock. He survived because of his psychological resilience, his trust in his crewmate outside, the team on the station, and ground control. That is ISS-era human performance.

That’s the era I trained astronauts in. First in 2011, working for ESA. Then I went back nearly a decade later (this time running my own company) to train the latest class of astronauts. I was asked to prepare them for missions beyond just the ISS.

Now we’re heading back to the Moon. Artemis II launches next month, the first crewed lunar mission in over fifty years. The profile of those missions is shifting again. There will be longer surface stays, more autonomy from Mission Control, commercial crews working alongside government astronauts.

What does this mean for us, not just for the astronauts, but for every one of us?

Every era of spaceflight demanded something different. The era we are in right now demands something different too, as AI is changing what skills matter. If AI handles the routine, the repetitive, the technical, and increasingly it can, what’s left is distinctly human.

We need the human skills more than ever. These are just a few:

• Judgement in ambiguous situations.

• Creative problem solving.

• The ability to build trust quickly across different teams, organisations, and cultures.

• Communication that actually connects rather than just informs.

• Resilience.

• Genuine empathy

These aren’t soft skills. They’re the skills that saved Luca Parmitano. They’re the skills that Challenger showed us we couldn’t afford to neglect. And they’re the skills that will define the next era of human performance, in space, yes, but here on earth too.

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Your number one job as a leader is to take responsibility. That’s it. There are a thousand other things that go into leadership, but what separates leaders from everyone else is this one simple thing. If you understand this, you understand 90% of leadership all at once.

The problem is, taking responsibility is hard. Even though you already know what to do.

You know what it feels like when everyone in the room is itching for some clearer direction, or when no-one gets what the speaker is talking about. You can tell when teams are working at odds, when one isn’t talking to the other. You know you need to talk to one more person, and that you need to ask one more stupid question so you understand what your colleague is saying. You know their idea is best, and no one is listening to them.

You know all this but it doesn’t make it easy to take responsibility and do something about it.

It’s like running. No one needs to tell you how to run. You naturally know exactly what to do. But doing it is hard. The most important skill runners develop isn’t running itself, but the ability to overcome the discomfort of doing it at all. Once they have that, they just have to do a few basic things over and over again, and they are a runner.

Becoming a leader is exactly the same. You already know what to do. What you need to learn is how to overcome your own, internal, psychological resistance, and take responsibility for doing a few basic things over and over again.

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Basic leadership

I’ve been in leadership positions my entire professional career. I started in the Army (the infantry, no less), then moved on to managing IT projects, and R&D projects, and eventually managing engineering teams building software.

Everywhere I’ve worked I’ve seen the same thing. Leadership makes an impact. And good leadership isn’t complicated at all. Everyone benefits, universally, when people take responsibility for three basic things:

1. Clarity,

2. Collaboration,

3. Decision making.

No matter the workplace, these things seem uncomfortable enough that they don’t happen by accident, and universal enough that when people do take responsibility for them, they have a huge impact.

Anyone can take responsibility for these things. Any role, any organisation. That’s the beauty of our natural affinity for leadership. It doesn’t have to come with authority. Whenever it’s present, whoever it comes from, people respond.

What if you want it to come from you?

1. Clarity

Imagine how much energy is wasted by people trying to figure out what you mean when you don’t even know what you mean yourself.

You are responsible for the quality of your ideas. When they tumble out of your mind they aren’t complete, or even good. You certainly shouldn’t expect them to be ready for other people to consume until you’ve done some work on them. Whether you’re working alone or in a group, producing good ideas is vital.

This is hard because developing ideas takes criticism. Either you have to take the time yourself to be critical, or worse, you have to share your ideas with others so that they can criticise them. You could be in a rush. You could be in a heated discussion. You might find it difficult facing the limit of your knowledge. You might also be in a position of authority and feel threatened by criticism because of that.

You have to get over this.

Leadership is literally about ideas. That’s what people follow leaders for, and it’s what they collaborate on. If you can’t be clear, and if you can’t help other people be clear, then the very thing you’re all driving towards will be wrong.

How do you start being clearer?

Defeat your fear of criticism, with fallibilism. People put on a good front when they present ideas. It can seem like they have everything figured out. They don’t. They’re guessing. Just like you. They’re also definitely wrong on some level. Fallibilism says there’s always more to learn, so we can’t possibly know anything for sure1. Yes, all our models and methods and procedures work, but they can also always be improved. Everyone is in the same boat, so don’t worry. You can have good ideas AND they can be criticised. So get them out there.

Be someone who expects to work on ideas. Since there will always be more to learn, and you’ll always be able to improve, there’s no such thing as a perfect answer. Instead, there’s a host of right answers, but you have to find them. This means you should’t feel disheartened when a great vision or plan doesn’t arrive in a flash of inspiration. But you also shouldn’t expect it to be easy. So if you want to make your ideas good, clear and thoughtful, expect to have to work on them.

Question authority. People have a tradition of saying “because I say so”. But that’s not a good way to make a plan. Ideas should be intrinsically good. They should make sense without authority. And, as we’ve just discussed, authority has nothing to do with making sense. Something might be right today, in one context, but it won’t be right forever. So you have permission to ask questions to make sense of what you’re being told. Of course, sometimes you will be the one under time pressure and you’ll be tempted to say “Because I say so”. But that’s not what you mean. What you really mean is “Look, I’m sure this isn’t perfect but we have a lot to cover so we need to do it like this for now. Thanks!”.

Think about the quality of your ideas in terms of how clearly you can articulate them. Not how subjectively or morally “good” they are. If you explain an idea to someone, could they actually do something about it? How many different ways could they interpret it? If your answer is “one” that’s good. If you’re not sure, then try harder.

Tactically, all of this shows up as being patient with yourself. Working on your ideas as they come to you, and driving towards clear answers by asking questions, even when you’re faced with authority. People don’t just appreciate the clarity. They need it. It’s a leaders responsibility to provide it.

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2. Collaboration

Leadership isn’t about getting people to do things they wouldn’t otherwise do. Or persuading people that you’re right.

It’s about taking responsibility for producing the best possible ideas, which people can understand, follow, criticise and improve so that they are bought in, able to collaborate effectively, and therefore prepared to do something they wouldn’t otherwise do.

That’s a collaborative effort, because the best ideas probably won’t be yours, and that’s fine.

We resist collaboration for the same reasons we resist clarity. It’s uncomfortable working on things in public when they’re half baked and they can be criticised, and It can be hard for people with authority to be open to others. They might fear being undermined or looking weak. That’s what causes the typical autocratic meeting. The one way tirade of nonsense from the out of touch boss.

Time, logistics and social pressure also make unique contributions to thwarting collaboration. You mightn’t feel like you have enough time to bring everyone together, afraid you’ll create another round of failed democracy and delay important actions. You might literally not know who to speak to. The right group might seem too big (we all know one pizza teams are the limit these days) - best not speak at all.

You might also have politics (read: fear, greed and scarcity) to contend with. People might not actually want to openly collaborate, because you’re an enemy to them - they have their own agenda.

But collaboration is vital. So someone has to take responsibility for it.

Build consensus. You have finite time and resources. Don’t waste them pulling in different directions. And don’t waste the human potential in your teams. People are magical. We’re all adaptable thinking machines that can achieve a lot with clear ideas. But when we take that same magic and spend it on unclear direction, we can do more harm than good. Teams can undermine each other, people can literally waste time, you can chase the wrong goals and ultimately fail for the wrong reasons. To get the most out of people, you are responsible for building consensus2. Not in the political sense of all agreeing on a compromise. But in the practical sense. Everyone needs to understand what you’re all working towards, in as much detail as possible, so their contributions are pulling you in the right direction - always.

You see strong consensus building structures in leadership driven organisations. The military orders process is a perfect example. It’s a formal explanation of a commander’s plan, filled with context, double checking and even practical models, which every leader is responsible for delivering to their troops. It would be outrageous for a platoon to deploy on an operation without receiving orders first. It would be equally outrageous for the Platoon Commander to have someone else deliver those orders. That’s for a reason. They know that building consensus is vital, and it’s the leader’s responsibility to make it happen.

Create the best ideas. A lot of leaders emphasise the importance of getting buy-in as if it’s a clever trick. That you should make people feel included or heard so they work with a little more commitment. That’s a shame. What people really need is for you to listen to them and adapt the plan, the goal, or the aim based on what they tell you. What you really need is to get the best possible solution, no matter the source. You do that when you get people to collaborate freely, openly and clearly. That way, everyone who counts gets to craft your ideas together.

Be adaptable. Nothing ever goes to plan3. Indeed, planning and vision in general are more use as a direction than a destination. What you’re really doing is going the right way, rather than having a very specific end point in mind. Having a clear consensus on that direction helps people stay adaptable, because they can modify their actions and keep them aligned to the overall goal without checking a thousand times. You also need feedback to the group, so as people change their plans everyone else can adapt too.

You can help that to happen by establishing communication channels and willingly and openly feeding back updates so everyone takes it as normal and contributes themselves. You can make project review meetings purposeful by calling out delays. You can be the one gathering information for public updates. You just have to take responsibility for it.

3. Decision making

You don’t need to imagine how much energy and time is wasted waiting for clear decisions. I guarantee you’ve already felt the impact yourself at least once.

Decisions are just an extension of making yourself clear. Selecting one path from several, so that people can stay on track, or change course as necessary.

But, it’s psychologically hard to take responsibility for decisions because people are terrified of being wrong and the truth is, outcomes are always uncertain4. Of course, if you’re willing to take some responsibility, you can overcome that concern (for all the fallibilist reasons we’ve already discussed) and get people un-stuck.

Make real decisions.The worst way to evade decisions is to say something that sounds like a decision, but isn’t. People in authority do this all the time. In sports we call this a hospital pass. What they say might be: “I need you guys to work together on this one, I know you’ll figure it out”. What they mean is “I don’t know, but I have to make it sound like I do, so now I’m going to let you fail, and pass it off as your fault”. Don’t do this. And don’t let it happen to you. State decisions clearly, so that they aren’t ambiguous, and you don’t leave people guessing what they should be doing.

Chart a course through the void. If you need people to make decisions and they aren’t, take that responsibility yourself. Say “Ok, I’m going to try this”. You’ll get one of two answers. Either your boss or team will say “NO!”, which is one kind of decision. Or they’ll say “Ok”. Which is another. Either way, you’ve broken the stalemate. And if the “No” answer leaves you back where you started, adrift, then at least you have an example of what a clear answer would be.

Get comfortable with risk. A lot of decisions are easier than they seem if you’re clear about the risk. Jeff Bezos has the concept of one way and two way doors. If something is irreversible, then deliberation is warranted. If it’s easy to roll something back, then just try it. A lot of things can be rolled back if you think about it. I’m sure there are plenty of delays caused for the sake of choosing between two options which could both have been tried faster than the end solution was eventually reached. Don’t be afraid to let experimentation do the heavy lifting. Remember, there are no perfect answers so you don’t need to justify yourself by having that perfect answer before you try something. It’s impossible. Just do it.

When you’re making decisions, you shouldn’t feel uncomfortable because you could be wrong. You should feel uncomfortable when you know people don’t actually know what they’re meant to be doing next.

You know what to do

Like I say, these are basics. You already know them. Either you’ve been on the receiving end of bad leadership, or you’ve been the one itching to say something but you haven’t quite built up the courage.

Courage is the operative word.

In the long tradition of leadership in the military, there are constant references to how important willpower is for leaders. It’s easy to think this is because Armies do especially tough stuff. That’s true. But it’s not the whole story. All leadership takes willpower. Whatever you’re doing you have to overcome your ego’s resistance and fear. But it’s worth it, because when you do, everyone gets the benefit.

1. Be clear

2. Collaborate

3. Decide

Put one foot in front of the other, even though it feels uncomfortable.

What do you think? Do you notice things moving forward when people take responsibility? Does it still work when they’re not the ones with authority?

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You are currently reading Part 3.

If you missed Part 1 or 2 , here are the links.

Part 1: Understanding Human Information Processing in Space Operations

Part 2: Cognitive Workload: The Critical Balance in Space Operations

Part 3: Practical Applications and Future Directions

How do we apply our understanding of human cognition to improve space operations?

This final part examines practical applications, from system design to training protocols.

When do we need to think about cognitive workload?

It is important to evaluate and reduce workload in the development cycle of space systems and operations when tasks are:

• Highly procedural,

• Repetitive,

• Completed by multiple crew members,

• using complex systems or,

• Simultaneous.

And we need to think about both short duration and long duration measurement. As in, how cognitive workload changes with duration.

We’re looking to reduce excessive workload wherever we can, to reduce errors and potential failures, and to maximise capacity for unexpected tasks.

To avoid imposing excessive workloads we use workload prediction by task analysis before a system is fielded; and assessment of workload after an operator e.g. an astronaut, uses a completed system or system component.

Assessment and prediction are complementary approaches to workload measurement, each with their own benefits and shortcomings. Assessment tends to be more accurate than prediction but can only be carried out after the design is completed. Prediction can be done early in the design cycle, but no fully valid predictive models of workload exist.

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What can we do if workload is found to be high?

If workload is found to be excessive, designers can:

• Change equipment and design,

• alter task requirements,

• automate some functions,

• or provide extensive training. (The least desirable approach).

How might we carry out any of these changes:

Changing equipment and system design

This could include:

• Ergonomic Interfaces: Designing controls and displays that minimise cognitive load.

• Intuitive Controls: Creating systems that align with operators' mental models.

• Cognitive Offloading: Incorporating smart design elements that reduce mental burden.

Preferably with a Human Factors expert to consult on the redesign!

Altering task requirements

Consider:

• Task Sharing and Rotation: Distributing cognitive demands among crew members.

• Structured Breaks: Designing tasks with natural pauses for cognitive recovery.

Automating functions

While automation can reduce workload during normal operations, its setup or failure can impose additional workload on operators, and low situation awareness can lead to delayed or erroneous actions in response to unexpected circumstances.

Finding a balance between workload and situation awareness by:

• periodically turning off automation to update situation awareness,

• designing reliable alerts and alarms to reduce visual monitoring workload while avoiding misses and false alarms.

Provide Training

With practice, workload on a task decreases, allowing for better multitasking abilities. The training curve follows an exponential function, and overtraining is recommended for tasks that may need to be carried out in high workload environments.

As people become more proficient in multitasking environments, they acquire time-sharing and task management skills, which involve knowing when to focus on one task and ignore or postpone another.

Some enhanced training protocols include

• Simulation-Based Training: Immersive experiences for high-stress scenarios.

• Virtual Reality Applications: Creating realistic, low-risk environments for practicing complex procedures.

• Overlearning: Extensive practice beyond initial mastery to ensure performance under stress.

• Metacognitive Skill Development: Training in self-awareness and task management strategies.

• Periodic Refresher Courses: Maintaining proficiency in critical skills and procedures.

Conclusion

The integration of cognitive science into space operations continues to evolve, becoming increasingly critical as missions become longer and more complex. By applying these principles to system design, training programmes, and operational procedures, we can significantly enhance human performance in space.

Moreover, the lessons learned from space applications offer valuable insights for improving human performance in various high-stakes terrestrial operations, from air traffic control to emergency response. As we continue to push the boundaries of human exploration, our understanding of cognitive workload management will play a pivotal role in ensuring the success and safety of future missions.

Question for you: How else could we reduce cognitive workload in space or terrestrial environments? What have I missed? Let me know in the comments.

This concludes our 3-part series on Human Information Processing in Space Operations. The principles and practices discussed provide a framework for understanding and optimising human performance in space and other complex operational environments.

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You are currently reading Part 2, but if you missed Part 1, here’s a quick recap and link to article.

Part 1: Understanding Human Information Processing in Space Operations

How do humans receive, interpret, and respond to information in space? We explore the fundamentals of human information processing and examine how the space environment affects our cognitive capabilities. From basic sensory input to complex decision-making, we look at how the human brain adapts to operate in one of the most challenging environments imaginable.

Part 2: Cognitive Workload: The Critical Balance in Space Operations

What happens when mental demands exceed human capacity? Part 2 looks into cognitive workload—quantifying mental effort and understanding its impact on performance. We'll explore the delicate balance between task demands and human capabilities, introducing the crucial concept of the "Red Line" in performance.

Part 3: Optimising Human Performance in Space: From Theory to Practice

How do we apply our understanding of human cognition to improve space operations? The final part examines practical applications, from system design to training protocols. We'll look at current practices, future challenges, and the broader implications for both space exploration and terrestrial operations.

Part 2: Understanding and Managing Mental Demands

Cognitive workload, a fundamental aspect of human information processing, quantifies the mental effort required to complete tasks. In space operations, where tasks range from analysing telemetry data to troubleshooting critical systems, understanding and managing cognitive workload becomes vital for mission success and crew safety.

The Complex Nature of Cognitive Workload

The relationship between workload and performance is multifaceted, influenced by:

- Task complexity and demands

- Individual operator differences

- Duration of work periods

- Environmental conditions

- Task combinations and interactions

Cognitive Workload and Performance

Research demonstrates a non-linear relationship between workload and performance:

1. Low Workload Zone

   - Minimal resource utilisation

   - Sub-optimal performance due to low arousal (boredom)

   - Risk of decreased situational awareness

2. Optimal Performance Zone

   - Balanced resource utilisation

   - Stable, efficient performance

   - Adequate reserve capacity for unexpected events

3. High Workload Zone

   - Resource overutilisation

   - Declining performance, pressure

   - Reduced capacity for additional tasks

The Critical "Red Line

A crucial concept in workload management is the "Red Line"—the point at which task demands exceed operator capacity. Operating beyond this threshold:

- Increases error probability

- Reduces situational awareness

- Compromises decision-making quality

- Limits ability to handle emergencies

Measuring Cognitive Workload

It is therefore important to evaluate and reduce workload in the development cycle of (space) systems, which involve highly procedural and repetitive tasks completed by multiple crew members often with complex systems simultaneously.

Both short duration and long duration workload measurement requirements need to be factored in when developing new systems for (space) operations.

To avoid imposing excessive workloads, a workload prediction by task analysis should be conducted before a system is fielded; and assessment of workload after a user uses a completed system or system component should ideally be carried out.

Multiple measurement approaches provide comprehensive workload assessment. This is just a brief overview of some of the methods available.

1. Primary Task Performance Measures

Measurements are taken of how well the operator performs the main task at hand e.g. piloting the aircraft, driving a car, operating machinery. Measurements, such as speed and positioning, are taken.

Primary task performance is expected to decrease as mental workload increases.

Examples include:

- Direct performance metrics

- Task completion rates

- Error frequencies

- Response times

2. Secondary Task Performance Measures

Measurements are now taken of how well the operator performs a second task as well as the primary task. They might be asked to do a memory recall test, mental arithmetic, or something that involves measuring their reaction time.

Secondary task performance is also expected to significantly decrease as mental workload increases and spare mental capacity diminishes.

Examples include:

- Resource capacity assessment

- Multi-tasking capability

- Attention allocation patterns

3. Physiological Measures

As the name suggests, measures of physiology are taken that may be affected by increased or decreased mental workload. Heart rate, heart rate variability, eye movement and brain activity have all been used to provide a measure of operator workload.

The main advantage of taking these measurements is that they do not intrude on the primary task, and so may be a truer measure of mental workload than secondary task performance.

Examples include:

- Heart rate variability

- Eye movement patterns

- Neural activity indicators

4. Subjective Ratings

Either during or post-task, subjects are asked to rate their perceived mental workload. There are the normal issues of subjective ratings and forgetting certain aspects of the tasks, but these are normally less intrusive measurements than those previously mentioned.

There are a number of different scales, but the one I taught the astronauts was NASA-TLX (Task Load Index). This is a multi-dimensional tool and measures six sub-scales, which are mental demand, physical demand, temporal demand, effort, performance and frustration level.

Examples include:

- Operator self-assessment

- Workload perception

- Effort evaluation

Despite the availability of reliable techniques for measuring operator workload, there has been less research on how workload affects performance in extended missions, particularly in extreme environments with expert operators such as astronauts on a long-duration mission.

This is Part 2 of a 3-part series on Human Information Processing in Space Operations. Part 1 focused on understanding Human Information Processing, and Part 3 will address practical applications and optimisation strategies.

This three-part series examines how humans process information in space environments and explores the implications for mission success, system design, and future space exploration.

What to Expect

Part 1: Understanding Human Information Processing in Space Operations

How do humans receive, interpret, and respond to information in space? We'll explore the fundamentals of human information processing and examine how the space environment affects our cognitive capabilities. From basic sensory input to complex decision-making, we'll look at how the human brain adapts to operate in one of the most challenging environments.

Part 2: Cognitive Workload: The Critical Balance in Space Operations

What happens when mental demands exceed human capacity? Part 2 looks into cognitive workload—quantifying mental effort and understanding its impact on performance. We'll explore the delicate balance between task demands and human capabilities, introducing the concept of the "Red Line" in performance.

Part 3: Optimising Human Performance in Space: From Theory to Practice

How do we apply our understanding of human cognition to improve space operations? The final part examines practical applications, from system design to training protocols. We'll look at current practices, future challenges, and the broader implications for both space exploration and terrestrial operations.

Why This Matters

While computers excel at rapid and repetitive calculations, they remain fundamentally limited by the knowledge and imagination of their programmers. Humans, with their capacity for spontaneous observation and creative problem-solving, are irreplaceable in space operations and here on earth. As we plan longer missions with greater autonomy, understanding and optimising human cognitive performance becomes increasingly crucial.

Whether you're involved in space operations, interested in human performance, or simply curious about how humans adapt to extreme environments, I hope this series offers valuable insights into one of the most fascinating areas of psychology.

Part 1: Foundations and Core Concepts

Understanding Human Information Processing

Human information processing refers to how we receive, interpret, store, and respond to information from our environment. In space operations, where data is abundant and often complex, understanding these processes becomes paramount. The basic model depicts a series of processing stages that characterise the flow of information as humans perform tasks:

1. Sensory Input: Initial reception of environmental stimuli

2. Perception: Organisation and interpretation of sensory information

3. Cognitive Processing: Analysis, decision-making, and problem-solving

4. Response Selection: Choosing appropriate actions

5. Response Execution: Implementing chosen actions

The Space Environment

The space environment introduces unique challenges to human information processing:

Microgravity Effects

Given the brain's plasticity—its ability to reorganise neural pathways based on new experiences—it's not surprising that microgravity influences cognitive function. Current research indicates that zero-gravity environments affect:

- Sensorimotor function

- Visual and auditory capabilities

- Cognitive function and cognitive workload

Mission-Specific Demands

Space missions require crew members to maintain:

- Comprehensive knowledge of spacecraft systems

- Ability to acquire new environmental information rapidly

- Robust information retention capabilities

- Reasoning skills in novel situations

Critical Cognitive Abilities in Space

The role of astronauts' cognitive abilities becomes increasingly important as mission autonomy increases. Key areas include:

1. Knowledge Acquisition

- Real-time learning about environmental changes

- Integration of new information with existing knowledge

- Adaptation to unexpected scenarios

2. Information Maintenance

- Short-term memory management

- Long-term knowledge retention

- Quick access to critical procedures

3. Dynamic Problem Solving

- Pattern recognition in complex data

- Decision-making under uncertainty

- Creative solution generation

Design Implications

Understanding human information processing capabilities directly influences system design. Designers of computer and automated systems for space exploration should therefore consider:

1. Human perception limitations and strengths

2. Attention allocation patterns

3. Decision-making processes

4. Problem-solving approaches

This understanding helps create interfaces and systems that work in harmony with human cognitive capabilities rather than against them.

Looking Ahead

As we plan for longer-duration missions and increased autonomy in space operations, the importance of understanding human information processing only grows. Several key questions remain:

- How do cognitive processes change during extended space travel?

- What adaptations occur in information processing during long-term microgravity exposure?

- How can we optimise system design to support evolving human cognitive needs?

In Part 2 of this series, we'll explore cognitive workload—a fundamental aspect of human information processing that quantifies the mental effort required to complete tasks in space operations. We'll examine how understanding and managing cognitive workload becomes crucial for mission success and crew safety.

This is Part 1 of a 3-part series on Human Information Processing in Space Operations. Part 2 will focus on Cognitive Workload, and Part 3 will address practical applications and optimisation strategies.

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Introducing Concordia, an “ICE” environment

Whilst at the European Space Agency, I didn’t just work with Astronauts. I also worked with a group of terrestrial explorers who volunteered to live and work in a remote Antarctic research station named Concordia for over a year.

We did this because although Concordia crews weren’t travelling to space they had more in common with Astronauts than you might think. For their year-long deployment:

• Their colleagues were all they had for real company,

• They lived in claustrophobic, industrial habitats,

• The environment outside could kill them,

• They were taking extreme risks,

• They couldn’t leave,

These characteristics are so specific (and interesting to people like me) that they have a special name. We call places like this ICE environments, which stand for Isolated, Confined and Extreme. Space stations, submarines and Antarctic outposts are all ICE environments.

How ‘ICE’ is it?

The Concordia research station sits at 3200 meters above sea level. The weather there is brutal - it gets as cold as -80°C in winter, and the average temperature throughout the year is a freezing -50°C.

Since it's located at Earth's southernmost point, the station experiences some interesting daylight patterns. For four months, you won't see the sun at all in winter, while in summer, it never sets.

Living there is really tough. The air is super thin due to the high altitude and holds less oxygen, so you've got to bundle up in tons of layers whenever you step outside, and you can't stay out for long. During winter, you're completely cut off - no planes or vehicles can reach you, so you have to handle any problems yourself.

It's so dry that the crew continually have to deal with cracked lips and irritated eyes.

No cute penguins either - the environment is so harsh that no animals can survive in this region, nor most bacteria. Your closest neighbours are at the Russian Vostok base, about 600 km away - making you more isolated than astronauts on the International Space Station!

The landscape is pretty eerie - a vast, dark emptiness with hardly any colours, smells, or sounds. This extreme isolation and lack of sensory input really messes with your body clock, making it hard to get a proper night’s sleep.

We treated Concordia as an analogue for spaceflight. Somewhere that’s not exactly the same as going to the space station, but from a psychological perspective, it’s close enough. The idea was that we could draw parallels between the psychological effects of staying in Concordia and, say, future long-duration space missions, like Lunar colonisation or a Mars mission. This helps us prepare astronauts for the psychological impact of space exploration and to modify mission plans to mitigate any issues.

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How did group dynamics evolve during 14 months of isolation?

Every year, a winter-over crew of roughly 14 have to prepare for, deploy to, and be supported through 14 months of life in the middle of Antarctica (and up to 80 people during the ‘summer’ months). The team is a real cross section of society. From research scientists, to chefs, to plumbers, electricians and medical doctors, all living and working together, isolated from the outside world, in a very hostile environment, for a whole year.

This led to some pretty interesting group dynamics.

Their journey started with preparation. Although we spent some time training them in optimal human performance before they deployed, the crew had a lot of other tasks to complete, and they were often visiting different research institutes in different countries at different times for technical training, medical testing, and preparation before they deployed.

When the winter-over crew came to our training at the astronaut centre, this was often the first time they had all met. When they all arrived at Concordia with the summer crew, again they had to reform into a much bigger team, building their group dynamics on the fly whilst they got to work.

Later in their mission they experienced further disruption when the initial summer crew of 80 dwindled to 14 for what’s called the ‘overwinter’ period.

I worked with several Concordia teams to prepare them for their mission, and there were three key trends I observed, which I think are interesting for us today:

1. An informal leader often emerged

During the debrief held after each mission, we often found that the person selected to lead the team didn’t necessarily become the go-to person for the rest of the crew. Nor was it the person with the most technical, or scientific background.

Instead, the person with the most experience of Antarctica often became the de-facto leader. On more than one winter-over, this was also the person who brought people together and cared for the crew.

That leader was, on more than one occasion, the Chef. Someone who’d lived through multiple missions and knew what to do and what to expect from the winter and the crew. He also had the role of bringing people together to eat, which enabled social interactions and improved team dynamics. Quite often, during the long winter, the meal was the highlight of the day.

2. Better contact with friends and family was actually a problem for group dynamics

We also found that isolation became a concern when crew members spent too much time alone in their rooms instead of engaging with the team. An interesting development occurred when they introduced faster Wi-Fi on the base. Previously, team members made considerable effort to bond and get along with each other as they were all they had. Once they could easily connect with friends and the outside world via the internet, it actually created problems within the team stationed at the base, as they spent less time and effort socialising together.

3. The dramatic changes in group size and responsibilities caused major fluctuations in group dynamics

The Antarctic summer-winter transition presents another unique challenge. During summer, around 80 people are at Concordia base. When winter approaches, most leave, leaving just 14 core crew members. Such a dramatic re-org forces the winter team to reform their dynamics and go through the forming-norming-storming process all over again (see the model below). When the weather improves, everyone returns, causing a second dramatic change in group dynamics during the mission. Every time, people reported significant issues as everyone readjusted to their position in the social order.

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What does this mean for you?

Maybe you’re a manager with a team you’d like to energise. Maybe you’re a boss trying to figure out why a team doesn’t seem to be ‘clicking’. Maybe you’re a team member who wants to change how you feel about work and your colleagues. What can you do with these findings?

1. Leadership isn’t just a title.

I can think of several examples outside Concordia, of teams rejecting the leadership imposed by a hierarchy in favour of the person they sense is the strongest leader. This can be managed well, or badly.

My advice to organisations is to choose wisely and don’t rush in. For example, when Astronauts are assigned to missions there is some politics involved, but there’s also a considered review process using tools like team matrices to ensure everyone’s skills compliment each other. And the ISS leader is always someone experienced, who’s flown before.

But what if you’re that leader with little experience, thrust into a position of authority? This happens a lot. People on fast track schemes, and perhaps Army Officers in their first appointments are good examples1. Things which can help you succeed when you don’t have experience on your side include:

• Acting with self awareness and treating the role as a growth opportunity. Don’t act like you know it all ‘because a leader should’, instead listen, learn and synthesise - prioritise building trust.

• Establishing trusted advisors. In the military this is actually ‘done for you’, since a fresh Lieutenant will be partnered with a grizzly Sergeant whose job it is to act as a mentor. Find your own Sergeants and build partnerships with them.

• Concentrate on your values, not your knowledge. People respond to solid values like courage and integrity wherever they come from. Build trust with your team by sticking to these virtues. They’ll appreciate you despite your inexperience.

2. Make time for your team to socialise

Maximum productivity isn’t the result of a slavish work schedule. We are social animals. Teams who only interact to produce the work they are paid to deliver miss out on opportunities to develop group dynamics which enhance their overall productivity and net out to increased productivity in the long run.

Sharing experiences other than work expose colleagues to different challenges, even utterly benign ones, which bring them closer as a group and enhance characteristics like trust, loyalty and mutual respect, which are incredibly important for a group’s productivity.

Try:

• Increasing (or introducing) away days, where teams help each other to complete challenges they wouldn’t face at work (think: escape rooms). or,

• Introducing team sports during work hours. As this meta analysis by Loughborough University suggests: “team sport holds benefits not only for individual health but also for group cohesion and performance and organisational benefits such as increased work performance.”.2

• Another activity I’ve seen championed by leaders is taking the team out to ‘cook their own food’, after a leadership workshop or similar. Learning something new together is always a good opportunity to share a bit of vulnerability, safely.

The important thing is to get outside the context of the workplace so that people can socialise together rather than work together. We have different personas depending on context and the best teams are ones which have strong bonds inside and outside of the work environment.

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3. Prioritise group stability and avoid frequent re-orgs

You may be familiar with the terms: Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing. This is because they are phases of Bruce Tuckman’s well known model for Group Development.

It’s a handy model for explaining the social and organisational steps a group of people go through when they are building a team:

I could write an article on these phases (maybe I should?) but the key takeaway today is that re-organisation is expensive. When groups first come together, because they are brand new, or they are being re-organised, you are adjusting the social structure. This is deeply harmful for productivity because the first three phases of the process (Forming, Storming and, to a lesser degree, Norming) are all sub-optimal for productivity.

Major re-orgs should be carefully considered before they are implemented and only when there really is a problem that needs solving.3

What do you think?

I hope you got something out of today’s article. If I’ve told you something new or inspired you to take some action, I’d love to hear about it. Likewise, if the issues I’ve raised are real for you, feel free to DM me, I’d love to hear your story!

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I wrote a short series of posts about the course content to put a pin in the work I’d done, and put the ideas out in the world.

Fast forward 12 months.

I’ve expanded my practice, and although I still work a lot in the space sector, I have a much more rounded client list. Although I wasn’t expecting it, coaching was a big part of last year. I took on 1:1 clients who all had different things to discuss and different goals to achieve. I also had steady demand for teamwork and leadership training from people in lots of different sectors, from government agencies to construction companies, premium landscape gardeners and schools.

What I’ve found is everyone really wants the same thing:

Better leaders, more teamwork, and real proven tools for improving performance and getting better results at work.

It makes sense.

It doesn’t matter if you’re an individual contributor looking for some one on one coaching, or a team of department heads asking for teamwork training. Soft skills get more and more important as your responsibilities increase and you have to handle bigger teams and more complex challenges. But our education system isn’t great at teaching them. Through school and university, the focus is ‘hard’ technical skills. We’re just meant to pick up soft skills on the way.

Only a small minority of companies invest in leadership training and programmes. It’s understandable, because it’s complex. The ‘soft skills’ which define someone’s ability to collaborate or lead are difficult to define, hard to measure and they often depend on ingrained behaviours which are hard to change. This often means that although everyone sees the issues caused by poor soft skills, it seems impossible to fix them.

This needn’t be the case. I come from a world where ‘soft skills’, ‘human skills’, and mental performance are known (because we select for them) and can be taught (because I’ve spent years teaching them). There are strategies, behaviours, tactics and tools used in the training I’ve developed and delivered which I hope everyone will find useful and interesting.

That’s where I’m taking this Substack.

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And I’m enlisting help.

The military might seem like a strange place to find ‘soft’ skills, but if there’s one employer in the world who takes them seriously, this is it.

If you want to become a leader in the military, you don’t get to sit an interview, you have to pass a course. A long one. Officers in the British Army spend 12 months at Sandhurst before they even qualify to go to their trade schools. West Point trains U.S. Army officers for four years. Enlisted ranks spend months training before they join their unit and every promotion comes with rigorous leadership training, especially if you’re in a combat arm. The military knows from brutal experience that in dynamic, complex environments, teamwork and leadership will carry the day.

So they teach it - rigorously.

It’s no coincidence that almost all the early astronauts came from the military, and even in 2009, 61% of NASA’s astronauts were military too. And, of course, many of the world’s key thinkers on leadership and teamwork draw on military lessons in their writing. Think: Leaders Eat Last, by Simon Sinek.

That’s where my husband comes in.

Paul was an Army Officer for years. He started leading soldiers when he was 21, and he’s been in leadership roles ever since. He went through Sandhurst, and plenty more leadership courses throughout his career. He practiced leadership on a day to day basis in the toughest conditions you’d expect an Infantry officer to face.

He’s also proof of how transferrable great soft skills are. Since leaving the military, he’s swapped soldiers for software engineers and now leads an engineering team at a corporate startup - using the same skills he learned in the military.

He’s as obsessed as I am with psychology, teamwork, mental performance and leadership, and he’s joining me as a writer here on Substack.

Over the coming months we aim to bring you:

• Tactics for making specific changes to your own habits and behaviours,

• An in-depth guide to the competency model I use with my coaching clients and the teams I train,

• Case studies of the impact soft skills have in the workplace,

• Insights into leadership and teamwork principles from the most extreme environments - space, Antarctica and war zones - and how to apply them,

• Lessons learnt transferring leadership skills from the military to the ‘civilian’ world,

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What can business leaders learn from astronaut communication? As it turns out, quite a lot. NASA's communication principles aren't just for astronauts—they can transform how leading organisations handle everything from board meetings to customer service. This week, we're bringing communication down to Earth.

🎯 Key Takeaways

1. The Business Case for Precision

NASA found that unclear communication wastes precious time and resources. Sound familiar? Instead:

• Replace long emails with clear, actionable messages

• Front-load key information—put your "ask" first

• Eliminate confusion by using clear language everyone understands

2. Leading Global Teams

Whether you're managing a space station or a multinational corporation:

• Replace technical jargon with universal language

• Skip cultural idioms (e.g. "ball in your court," "bite the bullet")

• Establish shared terminology for key processes

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🔍 Why This Matters

• Faster decision-making in high-pressure situations

• Fewer misunderstandings in meetings and emails

• Improved collaboration across departments

• Clearer customer communications

📋 Put It Into Practice

Meeting Requests

• ❌ Before: "I was thinking we should probably get together sometime soon to discuss the marketing strategy when you have a chance."

• ✅ After: "Request 30-minute meeting to review Q4 marketing strategy. Available Monday or Tuesday 2-4pm."

Project Updates

• ❌ Before: "Just wanted to let you know that things are moving along with the project, although we've hit a few snags here and there, but we're working through them."

• ✅ After: "Project status: On track for December launch. Two risks identified: supplier delays and budget constraints. Solution proposal attached."

🚀 One Thing To Try This Week

In your next team meeting, practice the "front-load" principle: Start with your main point or request in the first sentence. Notice how this changes the pace and clarity of your discussion.

➡️ Don't miss out - subscribe now to get our weekly human performance insights delivered straight to your inbox.

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The session covered the following key aspects:

🖥️ General Properties of Well-designed Crew Interfaces: Usability, Simplicity, Consistency, and Legibility. These properties ensure that interfaces are intuitive, easy to use, and reduce cognitive load.

👀 Visual Displays: Well-designed visual displays are clear, simple, consistent, and adaptable to various user needs. Effective visual displays are critical for task performance and error prevention.

🎛️ Controls: The design of controls, including buttons, switches, and touchscreens, must consider the user’s environment, physical conditions, and specific task requirements. Properly designed controls enhance usability and reduce the likelihood of operational errors.

🔊 Audio Displays and Alarms: Audio interfaces must be audible, distinguishable, and meaningful. They play a vital role in getting and focusing attention, especially in high-stress or emergency situations.

🏷️ Labels: Effective labelling helps in quick identification, interpreting procedures, and avoiding hazards. Good labels are crucial for minimising errors and ensuring a smooth workflow.

These insights highlight the importance of human factors in space system design. A well-thought-out crew interface can make a significant difference in mission outcomes by enhancing user interaction and reducing the potential for mistakes.

Photo of Tim Peake inside the ISS, Credit ESA