Laika's Window

by Kurt Caswell

  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.”

  After about three weeks of web spinning, Arabella was shuttled back into her vial, and Anita was released into the box. The results were pretty near the same. Anita’s first efforts were feeble, and after a couple of days and a couple of tries she got the hang of it. She began to spin lovely little webs in space. “It is probably the absence of body weight which disturbed each of the two animals severely during the first days after release from the vial,” Witt and his co-authors write. Then on September 16, Garriott found Anita dead in the box. He collected her body and returned it to the vial. She would return to Earth with the crew for further examination.

  The crew splashed down in the Pacific on September 25, and now back on Earth they found Arabella dead too, likely from starvation. It was a long way to go for two spiders. During their flight, Arabella and Anita got a lot of press, their story and pictures in newspapers and on TV. They were famous spiders now, despite the fact that they were dead, and so their curled, dead bodies joined the permanent collection at the Smithsonian. The most interesting finding, write Witt and his co-authors, has little to do with observations about the nervous system but with “the ability of an invertebrate animal with as rigid a behavior pattern as orb-web construction which is relatively independent of experience to find alternate ways to complete a perfect trap for food and thereby increase its chance for survival.”

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  In 2007 the European Space Agency sent a community of tardigrades, also known as the water bear, into the vacuum of space on the Foton-M3 mission. The water bear is a microscopic invertebrate animal left over from the Cretaceous, and likely even further back, which means it has been around for at least 250 million years. Under a microscope it does look like a little bear, with a barrel-like body, eight little bear legs with claws, and a snout-like mouth used to pierce the cells of the tiny plants, algae, and invertebrates that it eats. On Earth, the water bear is found almost everywhere. It flourishes in mosses and marshes where conditions are generally warm and moist. It has also been found in the most extreme environments: under crushing pressure at ocean depths, at dizzyingly low pressure at mountain heights, in roiling hot springs, and on barren ice shelves. It lives in the wet, warm tropics and in dry, sandy deserts. Nearly unkillable, it is one of the hardiest animals on Earth.

  After ten days of exposure to space on the Foton-M3, the water bears returned to Earth alive. A human being exposed to space without protection has about 30 to 90 seconds to live, and up to 180 seconds for Chuck Norris. It’s not just the absence of breathable air that is the problem. It’s also temperature extremes, the absence of atmospheric pressure (vacuum), and radiation. The water bear withstood all of this for ten days. It managed temperature ranges from -272.8 degrees Celsius (three times colder than the coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth) to 151 degrees Celsius (hot enough to bake bread or slow roast a chicken). The vacuum of space had almost no negative effects on the water bear. And it withstood cosmic radiation at a level 1,000 times greater than what we experience here on Earth. The UV radiation from our sun is also over 1,000 times greater in space than here on Earth, and it fries cellular structures and DNA. At this intensity a number of water bears did die, but a number also survived.

  How does the water bear do it? The water bear does it by dropping into a dormant state. It reduces the moisture content in its body to as low as 3 percent and hardens the membranes of its cells. In effect, it creates its own protective shell called a tun, a little spacecraft if you will, inside which it waits for conditions to improve. Caspar Henderson writes in his fantastic book The Book of Barely Imagined Beings that on Earth the water bear can remain in this state for 120 years. When conditions improve, the water bear rehydrates itself and goes about its business, a “micro, aqueous Phoenix,” Henderson calls it, rising up from the dead.

  There is something even more curious going on here too. In 2015 a team of scientists from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill announced that they had successfully sequenced the genome of the water bear. What they discovered is that upward of 17.5 percent of the water bear’s genes are not water bear genes. They come from other species, from bacteria, plants, fungi, and various microbes. Until now, it was thought that such gene borrowing occurred at a much lesser rate among Earth species. The rotifer was the previous champ at 8 to 9 percent, while most animals will carry only about 1 percent foreign DNA. The water bear accomplishes its feat through horizontal gene transfer as opposed to sexual reproduction. As it is coming out of its dormant state and reconstituting its body with water, its cell membranes are porous, even leaky, allowing foreign DNA and other molecules to enter. Some of these foreign bodies may be of no help at all and may even cause death. But some of them work to the water bear’s advantage. Natural selection takes care of the rest, and 250 million years later we have an animal that really is as tough as Superman. It may be that the water bear’s ability to withstand extreme environments is based on the acquisition of these foreign DNA, just as the process of moving into and out of its dormant state to withstand these extreme environments allows the acquisition to occur.

  Studying the water bear as it endures the vacuum of space may help answer questions about the origin of life on Earth. Some scientists see evidence for Mars and Earth sharing in the origin of life during the planet-forming age of our solar system, and it may be that life persists on Mars, deep underground—we do not yet know. In 2016 scientists working in Greenland found the oldest fossils yet known—communities of bacte
ria, known as stromatolites—and they were alive at a time when Earth and Mars were much the same. So if life emerged in the conditions on Earth at that time, it could have emerged on Mars too. Or it’s possible that life began on Mars and then was transferred or migrated to Earth. Species on Earth have always traveled across great distances borne on the wind, flushed down great rivers, riding rafts of flotsam across the seas from continent to continent. So why not through space? Transpermia, as the theory is known, takes into account the possibility that life may travel through space from planet to planet, or even between solar systems. Perhaps life is in the business of traveling about our galaxy, traveling about the cosmos, and seeding suitable planets as it goes. Perhaps the water bear came to Earth from somewhere else. Perhaps it is not to the Earth alone that we belong, but to the great cosmos itself.

  In 2011 the California-based Planetary Society, working with scientists in Russia and Germany, set up the Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment to test this theory of transpermia by sending the water bear (along with samples of various bacteria, eukaryotes, and archaea) to Phobos, one of the two moons of Mars. In fact, so likely was it that at least some of the samples would survive deep-space travel and arrive at Phobos alive that the International Committee Against Mars Sample Return positioned itself against the mission. The probability that the samples would contaminate Phobos, and possibly Mars, they said, was too high to risk the science at all. The mission flew anyway, but the spacecraft stalled out in Earth orbit. A programming error on the Russian rocket made it impossible to boost it out of orbit and on to Mars. It eventually burned up on reentry, with fragments crashing into the Pacific Ocean near Chile.

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  It is impossible to hear these stories of animals flung into space—whether they lived or died—and not feel something for them, to come face-to-face with the plight of these beings, some of them very much like us, some of them with whom we share our daily lives. It is impossible to hear how these animals were taken from city streets and out of jungles, where they had lived by their own will and interests, and not grieve for them. It is impossible to look at photographs of them, their bodies confined by little space suits, strapped into metal harnesses to keep them “safe,” their faces bearing the g-force of rocket flight, or in a contortion of enforced anesthesia from which they never will awake, and not wonder how human beings could do such things to them. The photographs are immeasurably sad.

  These stories and photographs return us to a central tension in this book, which is a central tension in us all. On one hand, we want to have what we want, go where we want, do what we want, at whatever cost; on the other hand, we love the living beings of the Earth, as we love ourselves, and we want that same care and love returned upon us. Caught in the middle of this tension, we suffer. And we suffer more, I think, to feel the suffering of another than we do even in suffering ourselves. I do not here speak of physical pain. It is not the body’s suffering we cannot bear, not the physical death of these animals in the fiery crashes of rockets in flight, abandoned at sea in sinking capsules, expiring in the desert sun. What we cannot bear is the feeling of loneliness that rushes in when we hear their stories.

  When we hear the stories of animals flung into space, we have to ask: Were they lonely when they died? Would I be lonely? In the end, I think, we want to know that we were not alone in life or in death, that our people, who traveled with us through our journey on Earth, will travel with us on the other side, our orbits each following the other to whatever end, whatever eternity. Somewhere inside us, we all understand that what we have is not ours, that this Earth, and all its beauties and darknesses, was not meant to last forever, that everything we’ve ever known will one day vanish without a trace. This kind of loneliness drains the world of color, drags time behind it like an anchor, and pushes the body into an unrecoverable lethargy where the very air—hot or cold—becomes unbearable, and the Earth seems a lifeless rock, a world of unbroken wastes and desolation. It is, for the lonely, as if the Earth were placed here, and we born upon it, just to ripen loneliness.

  In their book Animal Astronauts, Clyde Bergwin and William Coleman write that a reporter once asked US Navy captain Ashton Graybiel how monkeys were selected and trained for their flights, and how these monkeys responded to the training. Did they train willingly, or were they forced? “These monkeys are almost volunteers,” Graybiel said. “During the preflight testing, we didn’t force a monkey to take a test if it objected to it.” This is some consolation, but I think we have to accept that unless a monkey is doing what monkeys evolved to do, they probably don’t want to be doing it. In the 1950s during the height of US rocket tests with monkeys, people from all over the world wrote to the air force volunteering themselves as replacements. People wanted to go up in those rockets so that the monkeys didn’t have to. A few volunteered to help repay a debt they felt they owed, men serving time in prison, for example. Send me instead of a monkey, they were saying. The monkey deserves to have its life. Surely my life might be used for something more purposeful than sitting in a prison and spending taxpayer dollars. The air force declined.

  THREE

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  The Making of a Space Dog

  A central element of the human future lies far beyond the Earth.

  CARL SAGAN

  Pale Blue Dot, 1994

  In fall 1957, under the leadership of Colonel Sergei Korolev, an engineer in the Red Army, a secret team of Soviet rocket scientists and engineers went to work on Sputnik II. With this second satellite, Khrushchev wanted something new, something special, something that would again demand the world’s attention. Drawing from the space dog training and flight program already in place, Korolev suggested putting a dog into orbit. The anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution was only a month away, and after the success of Sputnik I the team had been released for a needed vacation. Korolev recalled them immediately to make good on Khrushchev’s order. The team did not have time to develop a system to bring the satellite and the dog back safely. Their order was just to get the satellite up and beat the Americans again.

  While this is the way the story unfolds in most accounts, Sergei Khrushchev maintains that it was not his father pushing for the hasty launch of Sputnik II but Korolev. “Historians in the rocket field ascribe [the launch deadline for Sputnik II] to Father, and even say that he ordered it,” Khrushchev writes in his biography of his father, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower. “I find that very unlikely. Father understood that as far as technical matters were concerned, he was not in charge. Everything depended on the chief designer, and not even on him, but on the degree of readiness for launch.… My sense is that Father asked Sergei Pavlovich [Korolev] whether it would be possible to schedule another launch to brighten the holiday, and Korolyov quickly seized on the remark.”

  Here at the dawn of the Space Age, Korolev was approaching the height of his power and influence, but in the early part of his life he had spent nearly seven years in prison. As a young rocket and aviation engineer and project manager, Korolev was interested in liquid-fueled winged vehicles, while his colleague and rival, Valentin Glushko, wanted to focus on solid-fueled rockets. Piqued by this difference, Glushko and two other colleagues (who had also been arrested) denounced Korolev as a subversive, holding up progress during that period of political repression under Soviet leader Joseph Stalin known as the Great Purge (or sometimes the Great Terror). Paranoid and ruthless, Stalin’s government murdered hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens, with some estimates putting that number over one million. Millions more died in gulags under forced labor and due to impossible living conditions. It is tempting to regard Glushko as the villain in this story, but as many historians point out, Stalin made everyone the enemy of everyone else.

  Stalin’s secret police arrested Korolev early in the morning on June 27, 1938, at his home in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg). His wife stood by helplessly as he was taken away and shipped off in a boxcar, unable to say goodbye to his
three-year-old daughter, Natasha, asleep in the next room. During his imprisonment, Korolev’s wife divorced him.

  Tortured into a false confession and sentenced to ten years of imprisonment, Korolev was transferred from prison to prison, and then in 1939 he was sent to Kolyma, a gulag in far eastern Siberia notorious for deplorable living conditions, hard labor, and torture. In Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps, Robert Conquest writes that conditions were so bad that more than two million people died at Kolyma alone. By the time Korolev’s nightmare ended, he had developed a heart condition, suffered a broken jaw, and lost all his teeth. He spent the remaining years of his imprisonment in sharagas, prisons for intellectuals, especially engineers and scientists. He was discharged in 1944, but his charges were not officially dropped until 1957, the year Sputnik I and II went up. In 1945 Korolev was given the Badge of Honor and then commissioned a colonel in the Red Army. Later, when news surfaced that the US planned to launch an artificial Earth satellite as part of the IGY, Korolev convinced the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the government that he could beat the Americans into orbit. And he did.

  It is a wonder that men like Korolev devoted their lives to the government that condemned and imprisoned them. How do we explain this? Perhaps love of country and the hope for a better future are enough, but Korolev’s greater love had always been his work: design and engineering, space exploration and travel, and the dream of traveling to distant worlds. He wanted to go to Mars. He was the kind of man who wrote his own story, who cleared obstacles from his path as he went, no matter the cost. He was fixated on a future he had determined for himself and for humankind. No government was going to get in the way of that. In his book Korolev, James Harford writes that in winter 1965 Korolev spoke with Josef Gitelson, a scientist who worked primarily on life support and ecological systems for the USSR’s Institute of Biophysics. Korolev told Gitelson, “I have a short time before me, maybe ten years, and I want to send humans to the nearest planet.” That nearest planet was Mars. “His original plan, even before concentrating on the Moon project,” writes Harford, “was to launch a cosmonaut around Mars.” He launched two uncrewed probes to Mars during his lifetime, but both failed.