KOLD News 13A Look Back on the Biosphere II Experiment 12 Years Later

A Look Back on the Biosphere II Experiment 12 Years Later

12 years ago, on September 26, 1993, eight scientists resembling a crew of astronauts, walked out of the Biosphere II after two years of isolation. "It was a huge moment of triumph in many ways," recalls Jane Poynter, one of the original eight team members.

Poynter and Taber MacCallum, another one of the original members, still live in Tucson and own an aerospace research company called Paragon Space Development Corporation. Both say their time locked away in a three acre enclosure wasn't easy and Poynter says it took a while for the reality of it all to sink in. "In many ways its taken that amount of time for us to look back and say ya know, we really accomplished something there because at the time it wasn't totally understood what we had done."

Poynter says the eight members split into two different groups, each not getting along with the other. The tension got so bad that MacCallum still hasn't spoken to his former colleagues since the experiment ended and Poynter is writing a tell-all book entitled, "The Human Experiment; 2 Years and 20 Minutes in Biosphere II."

What they had done was successfully seal themselves inside an artificial ecosystem as part of a 150 million dollar experiment in human self sufficiency. They produced 80 percent of their own food using recycled air and water. Completely controlling their own form of mother nature in a glass enclosed environment and MacCallum says they had their fair share of doubters. "A lot of people were saying it'll never work, everything will die in a week if that, well it lived for two years."

We learned a lot about the resiliency and plasticity of an ecosystem. "Now, more than a decade later, Poynter and MacCallum are still using the knowledge they gained from Biosphere II in their company as they help develop NASA's next space ship, the Crew Exploration Vehicle. "NASA is very interested in our experiment in Biosphere II," says MacCallum. "We give talks and write papers about the experiment of being a crew member for a long duration because there aren't any other analogs now, so NASA is saying where do we go to find something that's like a trip to mars and they keep coming back around to Biosphere II."

And that was the original intent of Biosphere II; to see how humans could live in a self-contained environment that could possibly be used in the future as a space colony and learn to live in outer space.