Later Philpott got a phone call from the press. What’s wrong with the mice? they wanted to know. They had heard the mice were transported by ambulance to a hospital. Well, nothing in fact, Philpott responded, nothing out of the ordinary. The mice were always going to end up at the hospital, because that’s where the lab is.
But the press was not too far off in their concern, because when Philpott opened the canister, he found two of the mice in good condition, two others in a weakened state, and Phooey, little Phooey, was dead. But then, Phooey, Fe, Fi, Fo, and Fum were always going to end up dead, because following examination the four remaining mice were euthanized for further study. Their bodies were preserved and flown to the Ames Center in California, where researchers concluded that high-energy radiation did damage the retinas of the mice but only minimally. The spacecraft had protected them fairly well. These findings gave Apollo astronauts a little peace of mind. In 2016, however, Florida State University physiologist Michael Delp and his team published a paper supporting findings that astronauts who flew in the Apollo missions outside the protection of Earth’s magnetic field had an increased rate of cardiovascular disease mortality of four to five times that of astronauts who did not fly at all, or who flew only into low-Earth orbit. Mice were again used in some of this research. Cosmic rays, then, are a danger to astronauts (and to mice) and will remain a major challenge for future deep-space travelers.
Skylab (1973–79), America’s first space station, rose into orbit on a Saturn V rocket repurposed from the Apollo moon missions, the final mission of the Apollo hardware. It had been just twenty-five years since Laika became the Earth’s first space traveler, and now humans and animals were living and working in space for weeks at a time. At the end of its life, Skylab fell out of orbit and burned up in the atmosphere. It was an international event. Some people feared it would rain debris down on top of them; others wanted it to, or at least wanted to find debris scattered in their backyards. Some people wore Skylab T-shirts with a bull’s-eye as an attractant; others wore hard hats as a repellant. Skylab broke up somewhere over western Australia, and a seventeen-year-old named Stan found twenty-four pieces near his hometown of Esperance. Then the town fined NASA four hundred dollars for littering. But before all that Skylab was an orbital laboratory, the next step in America’s space program after the beauty and power of Apollo. What made Skylab really sing was the NASA Skylab Student Experiment Competition wherein a panel of National Science Teacher Association judges selected science projects to carry into space, proposed by students from all over the US.
One of the best experiments was “Web Formation in Zero Gravity,” proposed by seventeen-year-old Judith Miles of Lexington, Massachusetts. It was the first arachnid study in space and featured two female crowned orb-weaver spiders that became known as Arabella and Anita. The experiment tested motor response in the spiders to better understand how their central nervous systems operated in microgravity. The orb-weaver spider wants to spin webs, as without a web there is no food, and without food there is only death. So the orb-weaver spins webs, beautiful, geometrically balanced webs. If Arabella and Anita could spin such webs in space, it would indicate that their central nervous systems were operating normally. And if their nervous systems were operating normally, perhaps American astronauts’ nervous systems were too. The experiment would also say something about the role of gravity in a spider’s ability to spin webs and help determine whether spiders, and other Earth creatures, could adapt to life in space. In his analysis of the experiment, “Spider Web-building in Outer Space,” published in the Journal of Arachnology, Peter Witt and his co-authors write that the fact that “spiders always run on the underside of a web or a bridge thread, hanging down as they move, makes one aware of the important role which the use of the animal’s own weight plays in locomotion and silk production.” What would happen to a spider’s locomotion and silk production in an environment with limited gravity?
The orb-weaver is a hardy spider that can live for up to three weeks without food, as long as it gets plenty of water. It bears a distinct pattern of mottled white over its abdomen that looks a bit like a cross, hence it is sometimes called a cross spider. The female is larger than the male, and as these things sometimes go, she will eat him just after mating. She bites him, wraps him in her white silk, waits. When he is dead, she liquefies his body with her vomit and then consumes him. She will consume her web too, daily, the sticky part where her prey is caught and rendered, and then spin another to await the next good catch. She hangs head-down in the center of the web or hides in nearby foliage with one of her clawed legs resting on a signal line, and when that line jitters, she kills and feeds.
A crew of three men flew with Arabella and Anita: commander Alan Bean (who also flew on Apollo 12), science pilot Owen Garriott, and pilot Jack Lousma. Before launch, Arabella and Anita were fed houseflies (lucky for the men on board) and given a sponge saturated with water. They launched on July 28, 1973, for a fifty-nine-day mission.
On August 5 Arabella was released into a lighted box where she would have the space to spin her web. Back on Earth, another orb-weaver was released into the same kind of box as a control experiment. When Garriott opened the vial, Arabella would not come out. Garriott waited for a time and then gave the vial a good shake. Out came Arabella into the box, floating away in microgravity, her legs furiously pumping as she drifted, until she hit the wall of the box, reached out, and grabbed on. Garriott would record the events with video and still cameras.
During that first day, all Arabella could produce was a little punk of a web in the corner of the box. The next day, however, she finished it, but it was crudely constructed, inexact and unkempt, with lines diving off in various directions. The strands themselves were spun at various thicknesses, and were mostly thinner, weaker strands. On Earth, a spider can vary strand thickness to meet the needs of its own body weight, but the strands are usually uniform in the spinning of a single web. Here in space, without gravity, Arabella had trouble sensing how much she weighed, so in her confusion she attempted a number of different sized strands. The main point was that the web held together, and there she was, Arabella in her space web, the first in the history of the world.
On August 13 Garriott destroyed Arabella’s web to see if she would remake it and if the new web might not be better constructed. But she didn’t remake it. She hung on the side of the box doing nearly nothing. Garriott decided to feed and water both spiders—Arabella in the box, Anita still in her holding vial. He replenished the water in the sponges and then fed the spiders a bit of filet mignon, cooked rare, meat scraps from the astronauts’ supper. Arabella extracted juices from the meat and then kicked the dried thing out of her web as she would a desiccated fly. Thus fortified, she went to work again, and this time she constructed a very nice, geometrically balanced web. It had taken her several days to adjust to microgravity, Garriott decided, but once she did, microgravity was no longer a deterrent to good web-building. In his evaluation of the experiment, Witt and his co-authors arrived at a similar conclusion: “There is a transition time during which spiders gradually acquire the skill to move ‘competently’ under weightless conditions.”