The second mission began on March 6, 1994, with a crew of seven under Norberto Alvarez-Romo. It was planned for ten months. The transition had been used well: artificial lights had gone in over the farm to make up for the winter sun, two years of respiration had worked off the worst of the soil’s excess, and the second crew would go on to grow all of their own food, which the first never had. In another year the story might have been one of a system settling down. It lasted six months, and the reason had nothing to do with oxygen.

April 1

Ed Bass had spent, by his own figure, $150 million, and by the start of 1994 he had concluded that the company’s finances were out of control and that its officers would not restructure. On Friday, April 1, he went to court. The New York Times reported two days later that the top six officers of Space Biospheres Ventures had been relieved. By the account Abigail Alling later circulated in a letter, which Donella Meadows published with the caveat that she could not vouch for it, two investment bankers hired by Bass arrived that morning with a temporary restraining order and six to eight police officers, changed the locks and the communication codes, and cut off the people who had been running the building from its safety and research data. John Allen and the senior management were out. The man put in to run the company was a forty-year-old investment banker from Beverly Hills named Steve Bannon, who estimated the year’s deficit at sixteen to twenty million dollars.

The airlock

Alling and Mark Van Thillo had been inside Biosphere 2 for the whole of the first mission and knew its systems better than anyone outside it. In the small hours of April 5, by most accounts, or April 4 by others, they came back to the building and opened it from outside: one of the double-door airlocks and three single emergency exits, five panes of glass broken on the way. The doors stood open for about fifteen minutes and roughly a tenth of the air was exchanged. Then the building was resealed.

Alling’s explanation, then and since, was that the seven inside had been cut off from the people they trusted and from the information they needed to be safe, that she had an “ethical duty” to give them the choice to stay or go, and that the project was “in an emergency state.” She added, to a reporter, that “in no way was it sabotage,” and the company’s managers used exactly that word. The seven chose to stay. Alling was charged with a felony; Carl Zimmer’s summary of what followed, lawsuits and quiet settlements, is as much as the public record offers.

Space Biospheres Ventures was dissolved on June 1, 1994. The second crew came out on September 6, five months early, with the company that had sealed them in no longer in existence. Meadows, writing that spring, allowed herself one conclusion about the whole affair: “It’s not the biosphere we have to understand and manage. It’s ourselves.”

The universities

Bannon brokered the next step. From the end of 1995 Columbia University took over the running of the building, and in 1996 it did the thing the founders never would have: it cut openings in the seal and ran the place as a flow-through system, a set of enormous greenhouses whose air could be dosed and whose ecosystems could be manipulated, with no pretence of closure. Some twelve hundred students passed through between 1996 and 2003. The research was real and some of it was important: the ocean’s experiments on carbonate chemistry became part of the foundation of ocean acidification science, and the rainforest was used to study how trees respond to elevated carbon dioxide and drought.

In 2003 management reverted to the owners, and for four years the building’s future was uncertain. In June 2007 the land was sold to a developer, CDO Ranching, for $50 million, with the University of Arizona taking over the research the same month; the university took full ownership on July 1, 2011, with $20 million from Bass’s Philecology Foundation, and $30 million more in 2017. It runs the building today as an Earth-systems laboratory, with, among other things, three artificial hillsides of crushed basalt in the space where the farm used to be, instrumented to watch soil form. The seal has never been closed again, and the lungs breathe for nothing.

The archive

Through all of this, the thing that had been the project’s whole claim on the future sat in a filing system nobody owned. The building had logged temperature, humidity, light and the concentrations of a dozen gases from hundreds of sensors every fifteen minutes for two years, along with the soil, water and biological surveys, in the five-level computer system the company had built with Hewlett-Packard and called the nerve system. That record was the experiment: the only two years of data on a closed, multi-biome life-support system running with people in it that have ever been collected.

In 2019 Carl Zimmer went looking for it. Mark Nelson told him that only a small fraction had ever been analysed. The University of Arizona’s deputy director told him the university “was not transferred any historical data archives.” The company that held them had been dissolved in 1994; its successors had been a receivership, a university that wanted a greenhouse, and a developer. “It’s shameful,” Nelson wrote, “to simply accept that these important data are gone.” William Schlesinger, the ecologist who had once run the building for Columbia, said its history “is too valuable to lose.”

So the year it fell apart cost more than a company and a second mission. It broke the chain of custody on the one thing that could not be rebuilt. Whoever plans the next closed habitat might take from this the least glamorous lesson of all: before the doors close, decide who holds the record when the organisation that made it is gone, and put a copy somewhere that does not depend on the organisation surviving.

Sources

• Donella Meadows, column of April 1994 on the takeover and the break-in, with Alling’s letter and the New York Times report of April 3. donellameadows.org
• Carl Zimmer, “The Lost History of One of the World’s Strangest Science Experiments,” New York Times, March 29, 2019. Bannon, the deficit, the break-in, the settlements, Columbia, the University of Arizona, and the missing archive. carlzimmer.com
• Christopher Klein, History.com, for Alling’s statements on the break-in and the second crew’s choice. history.com
• Associated Press and Chicago Tribune reports of April 1994 on the break-in (“Crew members sought in sabotage at Biosphere,” Tampa Bay Times, April 5, 1994). The doors opened, the panes broken, and the quotations.
• Mark Nelson and William F. Dempster, “Living in space,” 1996, for the second crew’s start, the transition’s improvements, the nerve system and the sensors.
• University of Arizona, Biosphere 2, on the Landscape Evolution Observatory, the three instrumented hillslopes built in the former agricultural bay from 2012.
• Columbia University Record on the Biosphere 2 ocean experiments; “Biosphere II lives on,” Mongabay, June 2007, and University of Arizona announcements of 2007, 2011 and 2017 for the handovers and the gifts. mongabay.com