TCNJ

31 WINTER 2018 could fit in a suitcase and a backpack — Addante brought an mp3 player loaded with the Jocko podcast, along with DVDs of The Oce and Neil Armstrong 's autobiography. In the podcast, former Navy SEAL Jocko Willink holds forth on issues of leadership and teamwork in arduous situations drawn from his military experience. He oers timely encouragement that steadied Addante in dicult moments, motivated him through fatigue, and reminded him to direct his focus outward. "Not panicking when there's challenges or crises. Being patient, kind, tolerant to your teammates," Addante says. "Talk less, do more. Listen more to other people." To hear a crewmate tell it, Addante took the advice to heart and put it into practice. "He's the ideal utility player — reliable, driven, humble, and knowl- edgeable about many things," says Reinhold Povilaitis, an Arizona State University research technician and flight engineer on the HERA mission with Addante. "Most importantly, he was always thinking of others. Teams thrive with guys like that around." Just over halfway through the mission, Addante's space capsule rattled one night, awakening him from precious few hours of sleep. Questions to Mission Control were answered with a reassuring shrug: "You're just passing through an asteroid belt. You've got some space showers happening." Houston, in fact, had a problem, and the crew members were in harm's way. Hurricane Harvey was bearing down on the city. The asteroid belt was really an approaching tornado that whirled close enough to force the crew to evacuate the capsule and take emergency shelter. They returned to their berths afterward to snatch a little rest before the next day's duties, but Harvey ultimately put a halt to it all. The crew was given 15 minutes to pack their stu and abandon ship during a lull in the storm, but Addante says the calm competence that had been a defining characteristic of the mission still prevailed. Frustration, too, over a 45-day adventure cut to 23, but there was a measured, surgical urgency to the response that inspired him even amid the disappointment. " You're just passing through an asteroid belt. You've got some space showers happening." In the end, NASA ocials prioritized ferrying the crew to the relative safety of a nearby hotel over their personal concerns as locals. A couple of them had their trucks stranded in high water on the space center grounds, but they persevered in handling the most mundane details on the HERA crew's behalf — and oering a sample of the usual concluding ceremony. "They were there soaking wet in the hotel lobby cheering for us," Addante recalls. "They even had quarters for us to do laundry." This was the NASA Addante had always imagined — scientific professionals navigating challenges with selfless dedication and good humor — and it only validated his long- term dream to be an astronaut. A formative family vacation lit the spark early in Addante. "When I was 7, my mom took me to see the Space Shuttle Columbia launch from Cape Canaveral while visiting my grandparents," Addante says. "She was a single mom struggling with four small kids in public housing amid a bad divorce, and that trip was her eort to show us a bright spot during a very tough time." Like most kids, he thought it was the coolest thing in the world and dreamed to become an astronaut, but for him, something was fundamentally dierent. "For some reason I never really stopped thinking it could be possible if I worked hard enough," Addante says. His eorts toward that goal began in earnest a decade ago, when he started applying to the agency's astronaut program in 2008 while he was in graduate school at the University of California, Davis. At Davis, astronaut and alumna Tracy Caldwell Dyson inspired him to pursue what seemed an astronomical ambition for a guy in the midst of a neuroscience PhD program. Since then, several unsuccessful applications to the astronaut program have not dented his ambition. Multiple rejections are common. Persistence is among the prerequisites, and Addante's nothing if not dogged. Case in point: He is on the verge of taking the final exam to be an instrument-certified pilot, and he hopes to one day earn a spot on a NEEMO mission — an underwater NASA lab in the Florida Keys. "Statistically, I've probably got only a snowball's chance at success for the astronaut program, but I have high hopes," Addante says. "I am going to keep trying." JASON KELLY is former editor at the University of Chicago Magazine. Addante recorded a message to TCNJ students from his HERA capsule: tcnj.edu/addante

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