Biosphere 2 exterior. Photo by By Jesuiseduardo – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=66071363

In exciting news, the new, neighborhood community garden project in Parsons Linear Park has morphed into something much larger in stature.

In addition to individual donations and neighborhood association funding, the committee behind the gardening effort is receiving financial backing from NASA/SpaceX that will allow it to expand upon its mission as ‘Biosphere 5’, an experiment testing the viability of closed ecological systems to support and maintain human life in outer space as a substitute for Earth’s biosphere. (Not to be confused with the UNESCO World Network of Biosphere Reserves).

Older people may remember the international excitement surrounding the construction in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s of Biosphere 2 in Arizona. A massive structure of steel and glass, it consists of several different areas based on various biological biomes. In addition to multiple biomes and living quarters for people, there is an agricultural area and work space to study the interactions between humans, farming, technology and the rest of nature as a new kind of laboratory for the study of the global ecology. The Biosphere 2 project was launched in 1984 by businessman and billionaire philanthropist Ed Bass and systems ecologist John P. Allen, with Bass providing US$150 million in funding until 1991. It was named Biosphere 2 because it was meant to be the second fully self-sufficient biosphere, after the Earth itself (“Biosphere 1”). In the late 2000’s, the complex was acquired by the University of Arizona, which continues research there today.

Obviously, the new project at the community garden site will be much, much smaller in scale. Neighborhood volunteers say that they were told to expect a soon-to-arrive fabric structure that is more akin to the temporary ‘bubble’ used to cover the VCU tennis courts during the colder winter months. Soils have been selected to have enough carbon to provide for the plants of the ecosystems to grow from infancy to maturity. Only two crew members will live on-site and they have not been chosen yet by OHNA (Oregon Hill Neighborhood Association) committee or NASA’s CHEPA (Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog) program. No word on whether bees from Open High’s hives will be included. As part of the biosphere project, some crops will be harvested for NASA testing. Much of the details surrounding this announcement are missing. Key among the outstanding questions is why at this public park location in this inner-city neighborhood?

When queried, City officials mumbled something about space tourism and referred to the Richmond Sustainability & Resilience Commission (SRC). Presumably, this effort already has royal support under the long-standing 2nd edict.

An unidentified NASA consultant offered this: “There is a lot banking on the ongoing Artemis program, which has a stated long-term goal of establishing a permanent base on the Moon, intended as a stepping stone to human missions to Mars. Although we know a lot already about the extreme atmosphere and environments of Moon and Mars, these biosphere experiments are being run in a wide variety of sizes and locations in order to produce a great range of test results among myriad conditions and possible threats.”