Trent Tresch, Cameron Smith, Kai Staats, and Deputy Director of Biosphere 2 John Adams work to return the welded stainless steel floor of the Test Module to a clean, inhabitable state, February 23-25, 2021.
The photos say it all!
The best thing about this project is that the Test Module is not a PowerPoint presentation. It is a real object. I am helping refurbish the structure, with long sessions of grinding or other manual work that is ideal for thinking alone, uninterrupted. Some results of that time and thought, in the following.
My mind first considers the time context of my surroundings. The Test Module is an artifact, a structure generated by the minds and then hands of people. I imagine them here, originally, blurs moving about the gravitational center of this structure. I wander through what Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) called the ‘billows of time’, writing in 1860:
“Rough Samuel and sleek wheedling James were and are not. Their Life and whole personal Environment has melted into air. The Mitre Tavern still stands in Fleet Street; but where now is its scot-and-lot paying, beef-and-ale loving, cocked-hatted, pot-bellied Landlord; its rosy-faced, assiduous Landlady, with all her shining brasspans, waxed tables, well-filled larder-shelves; her cooks, and bootjacks, and errand-boys, and watery-mouthed hangers-on? Gone! Gone!…The Bottles they drank out of are all broken, the Chairs they sat on all rotted and burnt ; the very Knives and Forks they ate with have rusted to the heart, and become brown oxide of iron, and mingled with the indiscriminate clay. All, all, has vanished…[yet]…the mysterious River of Existence rushes on: a new Billow thereof has arrived, and lashes wildly as ever round the old embankments; but the former Billow, with its loud, mad eddyings, where is it?”
From page 88 of Carlyle, T. 1860. Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (III). Boston, Brown and Taggard.
We’re the most recent of these billows, Kai, Trent, and myself. We rush around hammering and sawing, painting, hoovering, hauling. Our efforts will bring some new function to this shapely structure. The results will carry on beyond us, digitized as scientific findings. Our small piece of the vast puzzle of human knowledge will be set in place.
The glass, metal, plastics and other materials composing the structure were brought together decades ago. From minds, to lines on paper, to materials brought together, to assembly. As with all fabrication it can seem like a slow form of magic. But it is not supernatural. Science outlines the relationships of things without invoking supernature, attributed causes to natural phenomena, and allowed us little humans to move and assemble an infinite array of materials for our various purposes. Today we move individual atoms, we control the flow of electrons; we are learning to manipulate remotely-entangled quantum particles. By less-subtle but still effective matter- and energy-manipulating means, the Test Module was constructed in 1987, enclosing just over 400 cubic meters in a sealable environment. It would be used to better understand the workings of living systems by the method of sequestering them from the rest of living systems.
These purposes were presented in Biological Life Support Technologies: Commercial Opportunities, NASA Biosphere 2 test module experimentation program by Alling, A., L.S. Leigh, T. MacCallum and N. Alvarez. 1990.
The structure was used, useful quanta were generated and then attention turned to the larger Biosphere, and the Test Module languished. It took on dust. Paint cracked and flaked away with gusts of wind. A window’s exterior pane was shattered by a pebble flung up by a weed-eater. Spots of rust wept orange streaks down the white exterior.
But after decades of this anonymity, attention returned to the Test Module. It still stood. Kai Staats, decades in the worlds of high power computing, radio astronomy and various fields of invention turned his energies to the research potential of the Biosphere. Deputy director John Adams pointed out that the Test Module remained viable. It needed work, but the essential structure was intact. In the nation and the world, the last decade had seen a new ‘billow’ of form shaping; serious thought was again entertained about the possibilities of humans living beyond the surface of the Earth. This can only be done if we come to understand the ecology of closed environments. Kai had built SIMOC, a computer model of a closed ecosystem now using the power of distributed computing to simulate complex habitats. The Test Module, thought Kai, could be the material analog of SIMOC, eventually informing, improving the fidelity of the datasets. And here we are.
We pull and pry old objects from the Test Module. White on black monitor labels “SAMPLE”. Grinding paint from a steel bulkhead, strangely familiar shapes appear before me. They remind me of Percival Lowell’s certain discovery of canals on Mars. We keep grinding and then paint and eventually these billows also melt away. When we complete a task we whoop and holler aloud. It’s fun and it feels good to walk up to our quarters to make dinner; tonight, spaghetti with a cold beer. One sunset the air was full of moisture, glowing.
The form of the Test Module is structured by engineering paradigms of Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983), who was – among so much more – fascinated with the concept and realization of efficient enclosures. Again I bump up against a billow in time, I was taken to meet Fuller at my father’s university in the early 1980’s, then he was carried off to his world and I to mine and here I am back in manifestations of his mind.
Next to being real, and not a PowerPoint, the best thing I can think of the Test Module and its associated SAM project and the Biosphere project at large is the goodwill. These are things manifested from the mindset that all humanity can benefit from science and the imagination that it can ignite. I wonder what visitors to the larger Biosphere 2 structure think of the project. Sometimes I thank them for taking a little while to imagine something else, other possibilities. There are other ways to be, we can imagine them, sometimes we build models of them, sometimes we manage to live them. Only the coldest cynic or the most disinterested person could wonder at the use of such giant ideals manifest.
Another part of my being here; space suits. For the last decade, after my work as a prehistorian at Portland State Univeristy’s Department of Anthropology, I have been engaged in designing, building and testing a variety of pressurized garments; bubbles of ‘livingry’ that could allow humans to survive, for example, on Mars. We test them at altitudes, flying balloons, helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft…whatever will get us off the surface of Earth and testing things in the real world. They are working; they hold pressure, maintain acceptable temperature and CO2 levels, and allow the mobility needed for their various purposes. A single suit takes some months to complete. Now I come to build some suits of this kind for SAM. The challenges are invigorating. They must be durable, washable, easily-repaired, with few complexities; like an old farm pickup truck, nothing exotic, but entirely reliable and eminently refurbishable. I’ll work to maintain these features for the SAM suits. I think about them as I sand the steel bulkhead. Circular motions. Can I improve sleeve fit adjustment straps? Did I ever follow up on that new snap-link closure? How often will these be used in a given SAM simulation day? I need to write instructions on how to clean with detergent and then dry them. I keep sanding. The answers are jotted down in my pocket notepad. The sky flares orange and we head back up the hill for dinner.
The work at SAM continues, each day one more item checked off the list. We are nearing the point at which deconstruction gives way to construction, where our effort to break is instead to rebuild. This week Trent and Kai lowered the massive, welded I-beam platform which held the even more massive heat exchanger. Trent remove those bolts that would turn, cut the others, and disassemble the frame.
Cameron removed a complex array of wiring and conduit from the front porch of the test module, the light fixtures yet filled with water from the last rain. The heavily cracked paint was ground and sanded to remove anything lose, the edges feathered, then secured with an exterior metal primer.
Today was a day for applied physics.
Starting with the angle grinder (a beast of a machine!), its function is based on (a) a high coefficient of friction between a rotating surface which is harder than the surface to which it is being applied; which causes (b) abrasion between the two surfaces, and subsequent (c) removal of material as the disc rotates at a high velocity with strong angular momentum (torque). As greater pressure is applied more material is removed, to a degree.
The challenge is to find the balance between the applied pressure and potential overheating. If the material becomes semi-molten, it is moving toward a liquid state which reduces the speed of material transfer due to reduction in friction. Hot enough to toss off small bits, but cool enough to remain solid. What baffles me is the structural integrity of those grinding discs. You can lean hard on them, directly or at an angle and they do not suffer divots nor shatter. Incredible!
Removal of the second, large gas analysis box was quite the challenge. Two times larger than the one on the east side of the north exterior wall of the Test Module, this one was equally wedged in place, the information panels clearly added at a later date. We attempted to remove all of the white “7” shaped supports but could not remove the middle two as there was simply not enough play with the box in beneath to force them loose (After thirty years of steel posts in steel sleeves in concrete, it is a miracle we got them out at all!)
Trent and Cameron used a makeshift lever to raise the box and insert threaded rod roller beneath, Egyptian pyramid style. We then attached load straps to the box, with Cameron on one and Trent and myself on the other.
“On the count of three! One … two … three—pull!”
Nothing. We tried again and again, but no go.
Then it occurred to me that my Subaru Crosstrek offers a great deal more horsepower. I backed my car. Trent attached one end of the load strap to my trailer hitch and with almost no fuel applied it came right out. What made this interesting to me is that when the box came off the rollers, my car hesitated for a moment. I had barely pressed the pedal to that point, and added a little more fuel. I could feel the power automatically transfer from one drive wheel to another, back and forth in fractions of seconds. The car was sensing slippage and correcting its power transfer accordingly. Not a mote of dust was raised other than that which was pushed by the box as it came off the rollers and into the dirt.
With the box gone the middle posts that held the information panels remained. The others came free with an application of a rust-breaking lubricant and repeated, swift kicks followed by jiggling and lifting. But the middle two were quite a bit more stubborn. As an archaeologist who best understands tool use by our ancestors, Cameron resorted to a calculated application of caveman physics—beat the [crap] out of it! It worked!
The removal of the dry, aged grow beds two weeks ago threw a tremendous amount of dust into the air, coating the entire interior of the Test Module. To clean the space frame and windows, Trent climbed up into the higher reaches of the Test Module using the safety harness provided by Biosphere 2. He is a former climbing instructor and as such felt right at home far above the floor. Throughout this project we have been reminded of the physics of static electricity when working with the shop vacuum. Any time we are pulling a large volume of fine dust into the plastic nozzle and corrugated tube, the acceleration of those particles in a volume of dry air causes a rapid, massive build-up of free electrons at a very high voltage (likely tens of thousands of volts, at a relatively low amperage). This presents such a challenge that if one does not maintain a hand on the metal frame at all times, the resultant shock can be quite painful. Wearing gloves only further insulates the body such that the pressure increases to make the jump. As such, Trent was hanging on for more than the obvious reason.
Dr. Cameron Smith from Portland State University has arrived to Biosphere 2 and SAM. Cameron is co-founder of Pacific Space Flight and Smith Aerospace Garments and will be delivering two pressure suits to SAM this spring. For now, Cameron is here to work along side Kai, Trent, and the Biosphere staff on the transformation of the Test Module into SAM.
The lower, exterior steel wall of SAM has held up remarkably well. Given that it yet holds the original paint and seals from 1987, there were only limited flaking and chips. The challenge was to identify loose areas of paint, remove, and then feather the edges down to the bare steel. Cameron was able to complete three sides of the exterior, some 240 sq-ft while Trent and Kai worked to safely lower the steel I-beam platform that until just a few days ago, held the massive heat exchanger.
As the 1987 Test Module was the prototype for the Biosphere, it was built using what proved to be an incredibly strong space frame designed by William Dempster and Taber MacCallum, based upon Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome. This structure is more than three decades old, yet the paint retains is sheen, the interior bolts are without rust. The structure was holding a steel platform and heat exchanger with an estimated greater than 2000 lbs weight. Trent Tresch and Kai Staats were trained by Biosphere 2 Research Specialist Jason Deleeuw in the use of full-body climbing harnesses and self-rescue equipment in order to safely conduct repair and construction of what will be the SAM controlled environment (greenhouse).
The day concluded with the removal of four steel struts, two of which held gas canisters and two other that held an airtight electrical box. Kai Staats used a metal grinder, 60 and 120 grit sanding discs, and primer to repair and smooth the surface of the steel beams in preparation for a new coat of paint.
Trent Tresch and Kai Staats work to remove 30+ years of rust and corrosion from the upper steel framework of the lung for the Test Module. This structure, built in 1987 as an engineering prototype for the Biosphere 2, includes a flexible, sealed membrane such that once inflated it maintains a positive pressure and provides an air buffer for the greenhouse structure.
When fully rebuilt, this will be attached to a corridor, workshop, and full crew quarters as the construct of a Space Analog for the Moon and Mars, or SAM at Biosphere 2.
Learn more at samb2.space …
Dr. Gene Giacomelli, Professor of Biosystems Engineering at the University of Arizona, Controlled Environment Agricultural Center (CEAC) spent two hours with us at SAM this morning. We requested his visit in order to help guide the placement of our new electrical runs, first order layout of the hydroponics, and overall considerations of safety in a moist, confined space with student researchers. We came away with a wealth of knowledge, and look forward to continued engagement.
John, Trent and I then met for an hour to discuss preliminary findings in our atmospheric composition research as it pertains to the automation of SAM’s partial pressures, and as we prepare to receive the CO2 scrubber built by Paragon, originally funded by NASA for a study of CO2 sequestration efficiency.
Aaron Bugaj, researcher at Biosphere 2 LEO and videographer lent us a hand for an hour, helping Trent remove the massive copper conduit from the old, elevated heat exchanger while I continued to remove old, unused electrical boxes and conduit. The result is a greatly simplified interface to our primary breaker box and 3-phase feed.
This second week of the rescue, refurbish, and reconstruction of the Test Module, what will soon be the greenhouse for SAM, has been wonderfully rewarding. Where our first week found us diving into what felt like an endless chasm of relentless cleaning, grinding, sanding — wondering how we would see the end of it — the past five days found us making good progress.
Doug, Tim, and Terry, veterans of Biosphere 2 for some three decades dove right in, with Trent and two UA graduate students Michael and KC applying jack hammer, shovel, and wheel barrow to the heavy, hard dirt. Trent, Tim, and KC worked at cleaning up our future Mars yard while another crew worked to carefully disassemble the old, massive heat exchanger in the upper reaches of the Test Module. The electrician Kevin spent a half day testing electrical circuits to determine where and how to power our revitalized greenhouse and crew quarters. Needless to say, thirty years of desert heat, occasional rains, and the teeth of mice and rats are not kind to wiring. Much of what exists will be pulled and re-run.
Sadly, I spent most of the week with fingers to the keyboard writing a grant proposal with Kevin Bovine, Director of Education and Outreach for Biosphere 2 while Trent and crew had all the fun — Kai Staats
