After Two Years, Crew Says Goodby to Biosphere II : Science: Eight participants reveal few personal details of life inside the dome. They speak fondly of the record-setting but controversial experiment.
Biosphere emerged Sunday from a two-year experiment in self-sufficiency, filling their lungs with fresh air and waving to about 2,500 reporters and cheering well-wishers.
“They said it couldn’t be done,” said crew member Mark Nelson. “But here we are--healthy, happy.”
The event, dubbed “re-entry” by Biosphere operators, blended NASA-style techno-speak with the trappings of a Hollywood media event.
Operators say the four-man, four-woman crew set a record for living inside an essentially closed structure--designed as a mini-Earth with rain forest, ocean, savanna and farm.
But the dome has been opened more than two dozen times, first for crew member Jane Poynter to receive surgery after injuring her finger and later for the import of thousands of small items, including seeds, sleeping pills, mousetraps and makeup. Outside air was pumped in once and pure oxygen was added twice to balance the atmosphere.
After testing and upgrading equipment, operators of the $150-million private, commercial enterprise plan to reseal the dome with a second crew early next year for a one-year stay.
The crew that left Biosphere II on Sunday range in age from 29 to 69. All are single and agreed to just one restriction on their social life--no pregnancies. They have refused to discuss possible romances or arguments.
In their remarks, they revealed few personal details of life under the glass-domed 3.15-acre world, and said little about their plans. But most spoke fondly of the world they were leaving.
“I certainly had a big lump in my throat as I walked around Biosphere II this morning,” said crew member Sally Silverstone of Walthamstow, England. “I milked the goats for the last time, fed the chickens for the last time, I saw the sunrise on the space frame in my apartment for the last time.”
Crew members lost an average of 13.65% of their body weight on a diet that was heavy on such items as sweet potatoes, rice, peanuts, bananas and wheat. They occasionally had an egg, chicken or goat meat and coffee.
The previous records for people in a closed system were a stay of six months by a group of Soviets in a closed Earth environment and a one-year stay by Soviet cosmonauts’ aboard the Mir space station.
The Biosphere experiment, once billed as a prototype space colony, has been accused of deception and amateur science and has drawn unflattering comparisons to Disneyland, in part because it attracted more than 400,000 paying visitors in two years.
Abigail Alling, the New York native who oversaw the ocean and coral reef, said most of the controversy resulted from the media’s misunderstanding of a complex project.
“Never did I give up on the experiment,” Alling said. “It never got to a point where we all wanted to get out.”
The project is run by Space Biospheres Ventures, a company financed largely by Texas billionaire Edward P. Bass, who has an interest in the environment.
During its stay, the crew produced 80% of its food, depending for the rest on beans and grain intended as seed and on a three-month supply of dome-grown food stocked inside before closure. Low crop yields were blamed on cloudy weather and pests.
Levels of potentially hazardous carbon dioxide rose, fluctuated and settled at about five times the normal level of the gas in the Earth’s atmosphere.
