Concord native flew space mission to an asteroid. Without leaving Houston.

It sounds like the premise of a reality TV show: Spend 45 days isolated with three people you just met in a cramped, simulated spacecraft that never leaves the ground.

Concord native Chiemi Heil, 29, completed the mission for NASA on June 18, and it sounds like she’s ready to blast off again.

“The best part was just trying to put myself in a real astronaut’s shoes — we wore the flight suits and used the same jargon they do,” she said. “It was just a little taste of what an astronaut might go through. The worst part was being away from my friends and family.”

Heil, who graduated from Northwest Cabarrus High School and UNC Charlotte, was working in event marketing when she took a job as an independent contractor for the Army. A tour of a SpaceX facility — the company designs, builds and launches rockets and spacecraft — reignited her passion for space and science.

She went on to earn a degree from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida and is working on a master’s in human factors — how to integrate machines, from toilets to air supply systems, with humans so both will work at their best in deep space.

Heil learned about the Human Exploration Research Analog at Houston’s Johnson Space Center while interning at NASA in the spring. HERA helps prepare NASA for future visits to asteroids, Mars and the moon. The studies it conducts assess how deep space affects humans.

When another volunteer canceled, Heil enrolled in a crew that included two PhD scientists and an Air Force pilot. Their simulated Mission XVII aboard the HERA “habitat” was to explore an asteroid. The crew’s black flight suits bore Star Wars-themed mission patches that, in Latin, said “May the Fourth be with you” to mark the May 4 start of the mission.

Volunteers were kept busy during their 45 days together, working 16 hours a day on about 20 studies. Among them: Correlating lack of sleep to cognition (volunteers were allowed only five hours of slumber most nights) and testing the effects of light and dark periods in space.

Donning virtual reality goggles, they performed tasks that real astronauts might such as obtaining samples of minerals from the fake asteroid and growing plants and brine shrimp.

The crew created a makeshift art gallery to hang their drawings and haikus, played board games and faked fancy Saturday-night dinners together with the same packaged foods astronauts on the International Space Station eat. Heil found the lights too dim to read, so she made 1,000 paper cranes, a Japanese tradition that’s believed to make a wish come true.

A recent visit to see her grandmother (Heil is Japanese-American) in Japan, where small living quarters are common, acclimated her to life aboard a three-level capsule the size of a small apartment.

“For most of it, I was pretty comfortable,” she said. “Some had a tough time in such a small space with other people. You’re always around three other people that you have not had a lot of exposure to until three weeks earlier.”

The volunteers were cut off from the world, other than mission control and one 30-minute phone call a week. Back home, a coworker tended Heil’s rescue dog, which is prone to epileptic seizures.

Heil’s now working as a systems engineering intern at the space center. She was among NASA interns who took part in a two-hour workshop for budding space explorers in Houston last week.

“I’m not sure if I’ve missed that boat or not, to be astronaut, but I would like to inspire kids that this is an option,” she said. “If I could just make that grasp a little more attainable and realistic, I would be happy.”

This story was originally published July 3, 2018 at 12:00 AM.