Western Institute for Earth and Space Exploration

Col. Jeremy Hansen, the first Canadian to travel to the moon, brought lessons from his mission to space back to Western University, where some of his training took place. The celebrated astronaut and Canadian fighter pilot addressed about 1,000 Western employees Oct. 14 at the annual Staff and Leader Learning Day. Hansen made history in April as a mission specialist on NASA’s Artemis II mission, becoming the first non-American to travel beyond low Earth orbit and around the moon. He and crewmates Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Reid Wiseman travelled farther from Earth than anyone before them, taking a 10-day journey aboard the Orion spacecraft Integrity. They tested its life-support systems and observed the moon’s far side, paving the way for future lunar landings. The mission’s success, Hansen said, came from a team approach to turning problems into solvable challenges. When the four crew members began training together in 2023, they soon learned they were a good team that needed to understand what it takes to become a great team. “There was a lot of times we were making it harder for each other,” Hansen said. “We knew we needed to start to figure out how to be a better and higher functioning team.” The team, including the substitute members for the Artemis II mission – NASA astronaut Andre Douglas and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jenni Gibbons – actively worked to improve their group dynamics. They added protected time to their training schedule, including in Iceland where a team-building expert taught that integrity isn’t a trait but rather a state people move in and out of through their actions. Hansen says they learned how to make amends when they let each other down. “The goal is to recognize when you’re out of integrity, acknowledge it and then state your intention to get back into integrity with the way you want to show up for others,” he said. “That lesson is ultimately why we named our spacecraft Integrity.”  

Building high-performing teams for space and beyond

The annual Staff and Leader Learning Day event is part of a lineup of learning and professional development opportunities Western offers its staff to help them build strong teams, navigate complexity and support students. The lessons learned from achieving shared goals as a team apply to higher education as much as a mission to space, Hansen told the audience. “You are contributing directly to something that matters to our collective futures, making an institution run and equipping our next generation,” he said. Hansen himself has benefitted from Western’s expertise, receiving training from Earth Sciences professor Gordon Osinski in field geology and planetary science for over 15 years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYWWHRDCJgw Anchored by Western’s research ecosystem and Institute for Earth and Space Exploration (Western Space), Osinski and his team helped prepare Canadian Space Agency astronauts for deep-space and lunar missions, including Artemis II. Specialized technology and expertise from Canadian researchers, companies, technologies and astronauts played a direct role in the first crewed lunar mission in more than 50 years. Before Hansen’s keynote address at Western, physics and astronomy professor Sarah Gallagher, the director of Western Space, highlighted the breadth of the projects undertaken by its researchers. From developing new ways to detect greenhouse gases and tracking migratory birds from space, to shedding light on the chemistry of the universe, Gallagher told the audience that answering these fundamental questions is possible only through collaboration.   Staff are essential partners in researchers’ discoveries, she said. “Hansen’s journey reminds us that ambitious goals are never achieved by individuals alone. They are achieved by teams of talented people working together for something larger than themselves,” she said.  

How the Artemis II crew navigated crisis through teamwork

Hansen spoke of the mission’s failures, not just its successes, as lessons for coping as a team under pressure. He even shared a harrowing moment when it appeared the mission wasn’t going as planned. Just before a critical process was about to begin – accelerating to more than 39,000 kilometres an hour to break free of Earth’s gravity – an alarm bell warned of a possible hole in the cabin from striking space debris. If confirmed, the stakes would be life or death, demanding prompt action. “We’re trying to survive in a capsule with no oxygen or air pressure in it,” Hansen recalled. “But this is the mentality we have in our team; we do something we call ‘acknowledge, accept and create.'”

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The process guided Hansen and his crewmates through every problem they faced: they acknowledged what was happening to manage their emotions, set those emotions aside to accept the circumstances, then focused on creating solutions. To troubleshoot amid the blaring warning alarm, Hansen and his crewmates coordinated with the launch director and teams at mission control – whom he calls the “real courage” in the mission – and ultimately determined the alert was a false alarm. The incident was just one example Hansen shared of the Artemis II team working through uncertainties on their mission.  

Optimism in uncertainty

In the concluding conversation with Jackie Book, director of Western’s commercial aviation management program, Hansen offered an upbeat approach to navigating the negativity encountered in daily life, particularly, he said, on social media feeds that focus only on fault-finding. He drew on mission control’s culture of “failure impact work-around,” an approach requiring team members to report a failure to their leader, then bring its impacts to the team, along with a plan to fix or work around it. “Nobody should be communicating until they’re ready to go the whole way with a failure impact workaround,” he said, an approach he feels is widely applicable in our everyday lives as we face uncertainties. Hansen said focusing on what’s promising and what is being done right, on issues ranging from the Canada-US relationship to concerns over AI, reveals much that is working well in today’s society. “There is reason for optimism,” he said. “We will always have challenges, but our prevailing story, if we choose it, is one of overcoming challenges.” Learn more about how Western is turning curiosity into solutions.