When the Artemis II crew spotted an unnamed crater on the lunar surface, it was Jeremy Hansen who radioed Houston to propose a name. His voice cracked as he spoke. A number of years ago, he told mission control, their crew had lost a loved one. Her name was Carroll. Commander Wiseman’s wife, who died of cancer in 2020. As Hansen spoke, Wiseman reached over and put a hand on his shoulder. Mission control went silent for 45 seconds. All four floated into each other for a group hug.
Hansen could have let Wiseman speak. He was the commander, and it was his wife. But he didn’t, and Wiseman didn’t need him to. That’s not something that happens after a few months of working together, and it’s not something technical training produces on its own.
What NASA Actually Trains For
These four people have trained together since June 2023. NASA has an entire Behavioural Health and Performance team whose job is to prepare crews for what happens between people when the environment gets hard.
The communication under pressure. The conflict that doesn’t announce itself until the mission is already in trouble. The way isolation and confinement shift what people need from each other over time. For deep space, where there is no safe harbour and no option to be back on Earth within hours of a problem, this work is treated as a mission-critical discipline. Psychologists study which combinations of people are likely to work well together, where team problems tend to surface over the course of a mission, and what training actually helps.
The research they draw on is unambiguous. Astronaut journals from ISS missions consistently identify getting along with crewmates as the highest priority before flight.
On longer missions — crews living together for six months at a time, different nationalities, different communication styles, no way out — it matters even more. What sits between people turns out to be as likely to determine mission success as any technical failure.
What Leadership Communication Under Pressure Actually Looks Like
NASA understood this earlier than most. In the late 1970s, a behavioural scientist named Dr. Taibi Kahler sat quietly in a corner while NASA’s lead psychiatrist interviewed astronaut candidates. No clipboard, no questions. After ten minutes with one candidate, he slid a note across the floor.
The psychiatrist read it after the session. It matched almost exactly what he had concluded from 90 minutes of clinical interview. Kahler was reading how people communicate — the patterns in speech and tone that reveal how someone processes the world, what they need, and what they will do when things stop going to plan.
His model eventually became the Process Communication Model. What began as a selection tool expanded into something broader. Kahler worked with NASA to incorporate PCM into the evaluation, training and management of crews.
Astronauts weren’t just profiled. They were given a language for what lives between people — what to look for in each other, how to communicate under pressure, how to stay steady when the mission got hard.
The organisations we work with are not going to the Moon. But leadership communication under pressure looks the same whether you’re managing a surgical team, a construction project, or an executive board.
The team that holds together under pressure because the people in it know what each other need before anyone has to ask. The leader who can read what’s happening in the room before it becomes a problem. Even in a short conversation, PCM can surface things about how people are communicating and what they need that might otherwise take months of observation to name. Not because the tool is clever. Because so much is hidden in plain sight, once you know what to look for.
What sits between people is almost never about capability. It just doesn’t become visible until the pressure makes it so.
Behind the Moon, during the 40 minutes when no signal could reach them in either direction, Hansen pulled out maple cream cookies he had brought from Canada. Thirty seconds together, that’s all it sometimes needs.