Constructed between 1987 and 1991, Biosphere 2 was a 3.14-acre sealed greenhouse containing a miniature rain forest, a desert, a little ocean, a mangrove swamp, a savanna, and a small farm. Its name gave homage to “Biosphere 1”—Earth—and signaled the project’s audacious ambition: to copy our planet’s life systems in a prototype for a future colony on Mars. A May 1987 article in DISCOVER called it “the most exciting scientific project to be undertaken in the U.S. since President Kennedy launched us toward the moon.” In 1991 a crew of eight sealed themselves inside. Over the next two years they grew 80 percent of their food, something NASA has never attempted. They recycled their sewage and effluent, drinking the same water countless times, totally purified by their plants, soil, atmosphere, and machines. It wasn’t until 18 years later, in 2009, that NASA announced total water recycling on the International Space Station. At the end of their stay, the Biospherians emerged thinner, but by a number of measures healthier.
Despite these successes, the media and the science establishment seized upon the ways in which the project had failed.
I suspect the way the project was treated was because the basic operation was presented as a given — the inhabitants will be sealed inside and the system will be self-sustaining. In that sense it was not a great experiment, but it was a grand experiment: it was large-scale, and we did learn things we did not previously know. When physicists build a bigger and better accelerator, the operation of it is pretty much a given, because we have a long history of building bigger and better accelerators. Even the LHC, with the well-publicized superconductor quenching and baguette bombing, the setbacks in operation were relatively minor and fixable — it’s not like the problems would prevent searching for the Higgs, they just delayed it a little.
But nobody had attempted an isolated man-made biosphere before. So I think they got a raw deal on the collective raspberry that the media blew when it didn’t work out as hoped. It’s nice to see it has served as a scientific platform, even if it is in a more limited way.
