Biosphere 2 Not Such a Bust

In most people's minds, Biosphere 2 was a fabulously expensive failure, a $200 million earth-in-a-bottle that choked on carbon dioxide and was overrun by ants. But not everybody feels that way.

"In our view, Biosphere 2 was a tremendous success," said Bill Dempster, the project's engineering systems director and designer of the sphere's remarkable lungs. "Many people don't realize that hundreds of papers were written about it."

Columbia University and the University of Arizona eventually took over the sphere, and its original inhabitants are largely remembered for  personality conflicts, controversy and general New Age oddness. But they left some interesting science behind.

Extraterrestrial settlement. Before humanity can establish communities on other planets, it will have to figure out how to live there, most likely in self-sustaining artificial habitats. Those discussions, dating back to NASA physicist Gerard O'Neill's deep-space cornucopias in the 1970s, fueled Biosphere 2's conception. Dozens of papers discuss its technical lessons for future settlements. Among them: "The legacy of Biosphere 2 for the study of biospherics and closed ecological systems" and "Living in space: results from Biosphere 2's initial closure, an early testbed for closed ecological systems on Mars."

Closing the bubble. Though part of the above category,Biosphere 2's seal system was so fantastic as to deserve its ownheading. The unexpected rise in CO2 and fall in oxygen that jeopardizedinhabitant health wouldn't have been detected were it not for itsnear-total atmospheric containment.

"They did the best seal ever madeof anything," said University of California, Santa Barbara naturalist Daniel Botkin, one of the sphere's original advisors. Biosphere 2 leaked just 10 percent of itsoxygen a year. The space shuttle leaks 2 percent a day. (See "Methods for measurement and control of leakage in CELSS and their application and performance in the Biosphere 2 facility" and "Oxygen loss in Biosphere 2.")

Atmospherics."It motivated a lot of research into oxygen dynamics and measurementsof the pathways that the carbon cycle was going through," said MarkNelson, one of the original B2 crew members. "In the global biosphere,despite all the research going into climate change, there is stillmissing carbon. Is it in the land? The ocean? In Biosphere 2, we couldpinpoint exactly where carbon and oxygen resided." (Read more in "