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30 The College of New Jersey Magazine On August 4, Addante and three other crew members climbed inside the three-story, 650-square-foot capsule at Houston's Johnson Space Center for a planned 45-day mission — with a team of scientists close by — confined as if they were really hurtling through space. Everything simulating space travel came courtesy of virtual reality, even down to how the moon looked in relation to them: "For the first two days, the moon looked like a marble," Addante says. "As we passed it, it got huge." Because "space is a dangerous, unfriendly place," as NASA describes it, the HERA missions attempt to understand and mitigate the perils — technical, physical, and interpersonal — of sending people there. Addante and his crewmates played the role of astronauts on a long-duration mission, serving as research subjects to help NASA understand how people react, and interact, in close quarters for weeks on end. Addante compared the experience to a "road trip with three strangers that somebody else picked in a camper that you're supposed to stay in for the summer." Wired to have their vital signs measured, miked to be heard even muttering under their breath, limited to five hours of sleep a night, the crew members were the stars of a closed-circuit, space-based reality show. Let's see what happens when four scientists …. When Addante got word that he'd been selected for HERA XIV, he was in Grenada doing decompression diving at a shipwreck site, living in conditions not unlike a space capsule. He had just 10 days to get to Houston, where he would go through two weeks of intensive training before spending six weeks cut o from life as he knew it. For Addante and the crew, the mission was like having the world's greatest amusement park ride all to themselves. They performed routine maintenance in their capsule, checking water systems or air flow, along with landing and spacewalk simulations using virtual reality. Highlights included descending with a jet pack onto a simulated asteroid to collect samples and, as if floating in space, performing external troubleshooting. "It was a kid's dream," Addante says, "and scientist's heaven." But it was not all fun and games. The crew's sleep was limited so the observing team of scientists could study the impact of accumulated deprivation. With the enthusiasm of a boy at summer camp — and plenty of experience with sleepless nights from pursuing a PhD and his pilot's certificate — Addante felt no obvious eects from the lack of rest. "You're tired," he says, "but, man, you're fired up because this is exciting." The clear-eyed scientist understood the data told a dierent story. "There's no substitute for sleep," he says, conceding that his measurable output, such as speed and precision operating a robotic arm to retrieve supplies, "took a hit." "I think we had a fantastic team that was able to manage those threats really well," he says, "but they take a lot of conscious eort." He arrived with a heightened consciousness about the importance of being a good teammate. Allowed very limited personal eects — whatever he vast, enveloping blackness of space reminded Rick Addante '05 of being underwater. "Like deep diving at night," he says, describing his experience last summer drifting alongside a NASA space capsule to perform maintenance or collect soil samples from an asteroid. Beyond the anchoring view of the spaceship itself, or the asteroid below his feet, he had no frame of reference: It was all "just black." Addante's experience as a scuba diver, which acclimated him to complete darkness, might have eased his sense of disorientation. But nothing tempered his excitement of being a NASA Human Exploration Research Analog mission specialist, which brought Addante one step closer to fulfilling his aspiration to be an astronaut. When Addante, a "blue-collar kid from the Shore" turned psychology professor at California State University, San Bernardino, gets to talking about the HERA program, his scientist's pro- fessional rigor and child's imaginative wonder coil around each other like a double helix. They are encoded in him, these intertwined traits, to the point that he sounds like an Indiana Jones of the space age. The mind of an academic with the heart of an adventurer. The mission inspired Addante both in heart and mind — even though every moment happened inside an immovable capsule in Houston only a few minutes from the nearest McDonald's and a Salvation Army Family Store.

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