There was still some very cool engineering that went into making what it was supposed to be. Check out this video on the 'south lung' youtube.com/watch?v=Wind4fjbt_k

Because they didnt want air going in or out of the biosphere they had to figure out a way to account for the massive change in volume as the air temperature inside changes between super hot days and cold nights, otherwise you'd blow the windows out of the thing during the day.

Run by Steve Bannon, of all people!

"Steve Bannon left Biosphere 2 after two years, but his departure was marked by an 'abuse of process' civil lawsuit filed against Space Biosphere Ventures by the former crew members who had broken in.[70] Leading managers of Biosphere 2 from the original founding group stated both abusive behaviour by Bannon and others, and that the bankers’ actual goal was to destroy the experiment."

Shocking ...

From reading the Wikipedia article, it sounds like "run by" overstates his role, but wow nevertheless.

I believe bannon came in after the experiment had already concluded.

I don’t know if I’d call it a total failure. There’s a pretty cool documentary about it an Apple TV+. I think if they had communicated the caveats better and more honestly then it would have been a success on the grounds of being a baby step towards the direction of the more ultimate case. I’d say the biggest success was showing that even with all the resources on earth available, this problem is non-trivial.

Low oxygen, low food, crashed ecosystem. Interesting science, but a total failure at demonstrating the feasibility of a closed ecosystem.

I don't see it as a failure? The first attempt needed a relatively small amount of oxygen injection (which is very much achievable for a Mars mission). The second achieved self-sufficiency.

Really more of a PR spectacle than a worthwhile experiment.

Including humans seems to have caused most of the problems there. If you actually wanted to experiment with closed biological systems in a useful way then I'd recommend doing a bunch of trials with a less cantankerous species of large omnivorous mammal, like the goat.

Biosphere 2 was originally meant to demonstrate the viability of closed ecological systems to support and maintain human life in outer space[0]

>including humans seem to have caused most of the problems

I chuckled a bit at your reply hvd.

The hardest, seemingly intractable problems in the world aren't engineering problems, they are human ones. If we want to level up as a species those are the ones we will need to figure out how to solve.