The crew of Biosphere 2 were not selected the way astronauts are. They were, with one exception, people who had spent years inside John Allen’s Institute of Ecotechnics, the group that had grown out of Synergia Ranch and the Theater of All Possibilities, and who had worked on its projects around the world before the building existed. They had trained at the Oracle site for years, running the farm, the ocean and the machinery as they were built, and they had rehearsed closure itself in the Test Module next door: Allen shut himself in for seventy-two hours in 1988, and in November 1989 Linda Leigh spent three weeks inside it, the longest human closure before the mission. The exception was the doctor. Everyone else was there because they had already given a decade to the idea.

Who they were

Abigail Alling was the marine biologist. She had built and would keep the ocean and the marsh, something over a million gallons of seawater with a coral reef collected off Yucatán and the Caribbean, an estuary collected in the Everglades, a wave machine, protein skimmers and banks of algae under lamps to keep the nutrients down. She and the others culled lobsters and triggerfish by hand when they ate too much of the reef.

Linda Leigh was the botanist. She had collected plants for the wilderness biomes and kept them: a rainforest of Amazonian species, a savannah from three continents, a fog desert patterned on Baja California. The rainforest grew so fast that its nurse trees, planted to shade the slower species, had to be cut down at twelve to sixteen metres before the first year was out.

Taber MacCallum ran the analytical laboratory, which made its own pure gases and water and monitored eleven trace gases in every biome, and he took the samples that went to Columbia when the oxygen had to be found. He is a co-author of the paper that found it. His line about the public’s expectations, that most people “thought Biosphere 2 was going to turn to green slime in a matter of weeks,” is the crew’s own account of the odds.

Mark Nelson, a Dartmouth graduate who had chaired the Institute of Ecotechnics since the 1970s, ran the wastewater marsh, in which the crew’s sewage and greywater were cleaned by plants and returned to the farm as irrigation, and handled much of the communication with the outside. He has spent the thirty years since defending the project in print.

Jane Poynter and Sally Silverstone ran the farm and the animals: the goats, chickens, pigs and tilapia, the rice paddies, the eighty-six crops. Silverstone was the food systems manager who weighed out every day’s ration and checked it against nutritional requirements; she wrote a cookbook, Eating In, while inside. Poynter lost the tip of a finger to the rice thresher in the second week, went out for seven hours, and came back with the duffel bag that followed her through two years of coverage.

Mark Van Thillo, a Belgian who would later captain a research sailing vessel, kept the machinery: the air handlers, the pumps, the lungs, the thousand things that break in a building with 800 sensors and 25 air handlers.

Roy Walford, sixty-seven, the UCLA pathologist, was the physician, and the only member of the crew with a conventional scientific career behind him. He had come for the diet.

Life inside

Each of them worked an average of 66 hours a week. About two-thirds of the time went on operations, farming and food above all, and a third on research and communication, the reverse of what had been planned; halfway through, the company agreed to let laboratory equipment be exported and scientific samples pass through the airlock on a schedule, so that more research could be done. Cooking rotated through the eight, each person doing all three meals every eighth day. Sundays were off, and the outside’s holidays, though the animals and the systems did not keep holidays. The crew talked to the world by telephone, radio and video, held meetings “at the window” with visitors standing on the other side of the glass, and were watched by something like a million tourists over the two years. They were hungry throughout the first year and short of breath through most of the second.

Around the sixth month they split. Poynter’s account is of two groups of four, “us and them”, who barely spoke for the rest of the mission; Nelson, who disputes how bad it was, allows that one of the eight remembered being spat on twice, and that they held group therapy sessions to keep the quarrel in the open. The split was over the project’s management and its honesty with the public, not over the work, and the work never stopped. Nobody sabotaged anything. Nobody asked to leave. Two couples formed among the eight; Poynter and MacCallum were one, and have worked together since. Eugene Odum, the ecologist on the advisory committee that dissolved in February 1993, called the mission “a failure of human relationships” rather than a scientific one, which is close to the crew’s own view. Walford, the oldest, recorded the symptoms of everyone’s altitude sickness and his own, and in January 1993 was the one whose arithmetic failed.

After

They came out on September 26, 1993, to flute music and a cartoon captioned “Snow Job and the Several Dwarfs.” Most of them never left the field.

Alling had co-founded the Biosphere Foundation in 1991, while still inside, and she and Van Thillo have run it since: a coral reef research organisation that has worked from two sailing research vessels, first the Heraclitus, then the Mir, which Van Thillo captains. In April 1994 the two of them broke the seal of the second mission from outside to warn the new crew of the takeover underway, were charged, and settled.

Poynter and MacCallum founded Paragon Space Development Corporation in Tucson in 1993, which has designed life support for spacecraft and other hazardous environments for thirty years; MacCallum ran it for two decades. In 2012 they founded World View, which flies instruments to the edge of space under balloons, and in 2019 Space Perspective, which means to fly people there. Poynter’s memoir, The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2, came out in 2006.

Nelson took a doctorate, has built wetland wastewater systems on several continents, wrote Life Under Glass with Alling and Silverstone while the mission was still running and Pushing Our Limits in 2018, and remains the project’s most persistent advocate. Silverstone’s cookbook is still in print; she and Leigh have otherwise left little public record, which says more about the record than about them. Walford returned to UCLA and his diet and died in 2004, at seventy-nine, of motor neurone disease.

The thing to notice is the ratio. Of eight people who were underfed, oxygen-starved, mocked on their way out and, in some cases, no longer on speaking terms with each other, five went on to spend their working lives on sealed habitats, life support, or the sea. Whatever the two years were, the people who lived them did not conclude that the idea was wrong.

Sources

• Mark Nelson and William F. Dempster, “Living in space: results from Biosphere 2’s initial closure,” in Strategies for Mars, 1996. The Test Module closures, the 66-hour weeks, the two-thirds operations split, the cooking rotation, the laboratory, the marsh, the culling, the nurse trees, and the 800 sensors.
• Mark Nelson, “Biosphere 2: What Really Happened?”, Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, May–June 2018. The split, the spitting, the group therapy, the two couples, the million visitors. dartmouthalumnimagazine.com
• Jane Poynter, The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2, Basic Books, 2006; and her 2009 TED talk, “Life in Biosphere 2.”
• Abigail Alling, Mark Nelson and Sally Silverstone, Life Under Glass: The Inside Story of Biosphere 2, Biosphere Press, 1993; Sally Silverstone, Eating In: From the Field to the Kitchen in Biosphere 2, Biosphere Press, 1993.
• Biosphere Foundation, Abigail Alling’s curriculum vitae and the foundation’s board page, for the 1991 founding, the marine system’s size, the Heraclitus and the Mir, and Van Thillo’s roles. biospherefoundation.org
• Paragon Space Development Corporation, World View and Space Perspective, company histories, as summarised in the Wikipedia article on Taber MacCallum and its press citations (Paragon, 1993; World View, 2012; Space Perspective, 2019).
• “Biosphere advisory panel disbands in frustration,” Associated Press, Deseret News, February 16, 1993, for Odum. deseret.com
• Earth magazine, “Benchmarks: September 26, 1991: Crew sealed inside Biosphere 2,” for MacCallum’s “green slime.” earthmagazine.org