NASA's Long, Lonely Mission Inside a Fake Spaceship

When Timothy Evans, Andrew Mark Settles, James Titus, and John Kennard touched down at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, they looked a little pale. The four men had just spent 45 days voyaging millions of miles through the galaxy to collect soil samples from a near-earth asteroid. Yet, they hadn't been to space. Instead, they'd simulated a fake mission inside the Human Exploration Research Analog, a 636-square-foot metal capsule that helps NASA understand how humans behave when cooped up in a spacecraft for so long. Space may be infinite, but spaceships are kinda small.