by Sam Kean
Science Pilot Garriott had spent months rehearsing his upcoming spacewalks on a drowned Skylab mock-up in Huntsville. On Mission Day 9, he shut off the airlock room to the rest of the station, opened the execution hatch, and exited to a place only 25 men had gone before him: out into the thermosphere, the “hard vacuum,” the emptiness between the Earth and its closest celestial neighbor. A 60-foot cord spooled out from his abdomen.
Slowed by the fat fingers of his gloves, he was surprised by the effort it took to pull a 5-foot pole of thin steel from the hatch, and then another, then another, linking 11 of them end-to-end until they made two 55-foot-long booms that pointed out into space. He then unhitched himself from the footholds to float a giant sail of thermally treated gold fabric to the attachment points at the poles’ ends. Next, he reeled the sail until it covered the orbital workshop like a golden duvet, shielding Skylab from the heat of the sun.
Before returning indoors, Garriott swam to the end of the windmill telescope on the other side of the spacecraft. Since Huntsville, he’d vowed to find a moment in space to put his toes on the edge of Skylab and to look down.
And what he saw was, in a sense, a distance equal to the entire length of the Grand Canyon. In another sense, he saw the equivalent of a a cross spider staring over a small asteroid, perhaps the size of the one named after the schoolteacher who died on her way to space. And in a completely different sense, the science pilot saw nothing at all.
Once back inside Skylab, Garriott discovered Arabella had spun her first web in microgravity.
The distance between a man and the moon is a spider hiking the Oregon Trail. The distance from a spider to the end of her six-inch silk tether is a man drifting on a sixty-foot umbilical. A man tumbling from end to end of a space station is a spider free-falling down a four-foot web.
For a spider is a particle and a man is a particle, and the spider attracts the man with a force directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of their distances.
For a man is least distant from a spider when the world he knows is multiplied by cosmic exponents.
For a spider is most distant from a man when she no longer has the tools to refer to herself.
The first web she made was loose and haphazard—a fun-house mirror of her gridded, Earth-spun work. Since she could not feel the weight of her body on the strands, the silk she spun was of varied and impractical thickness. Few of the lines were taut or straight. The web looked like the worn-out shawl of a sideshow palmist, or a sea net from which any fish could manage escape. It is the kind of web only spun on Earth when a spider has just molted, or is quite near her death. It is not unlike a web spun by an amputee spider, or the spider that a Swiss pharmacologist spiked with D-Amphetamine in 1948.
Space was a kind of stimulant for the Skylab crew, who, in the second week of their nine-week flight, radioed Mission Control for extra work. Science Pilot Garriott logged 22 hours in a single mission day. Though NASA had proposed sending them to space with a game console and movie projector, all the crew really wanted to do for R and R was stare out the window and monkey around in the microgravity. Because space awakens things in the human body. The men had become more dexterous and less nauseated. Zero-G decompressed their vertebrae; each man stretched at least an inch by splashdown.
In the evenings, the men floated to the ring of hulking white lockers that encircled one end of the workshop and they ran laps, running the “wheel” from wall to ceiling and back down, like three Astaire hamsters. Or they would tumble and flip in their white socks and boxers, gliding into one another, making water-ballerina shapes. They challenged each other to contests of floating—from the trash airlock, down past Arabella’s TV cage, past the kitchen and through the hatches, all the way to the command module that brought them to space—without flapping an appendage.
“We might have had a shot at the Olympics,” Garriott later quipped. The science pilot called this feat “playing Spider-Man.”
The lights came on in Arabella’s cage, simulating sunrise. It was six days after her release from the vial and two weeks after launch, and her air was still charged with that defeating kind of nothing that kept her lines from catching and confounded her body when she tried to rappel. But the walls of the cage were solid in a way she could understand, so she connected a taut bridge line in the short gap between them. The only way to make a web in flight, she discovered, was to avoid flight—to stay grounded.
Clinging to the walls and corners of the cage, she made more short silk lines, pulled them as tightly as she could, and walked along them (rather than free-falling) to affix every radial, every spiral turn. She used the length of her hind legs to measure each spiral; each ring matched the distance between her spinneret and the tip of her back claw. The central claws of her third pair of legs clung to the silk like grappling hooks.
It was a less ambitious web in certain aspects. She had ringed it in fewer spirals and omitted the crucial lopsidedness of lining the web-bottom with that stickier silk. But the structure was even and tight. Back home, a human face crashing through it would have thought it the work of any earthbound arachnid.
From Commander Bean’s journal, August 7: “Arabella finished her web perfectly. When Owen told Jack at breakfast, Jack said, ‘Well, that’s good. I like to see a spider do something at least once in a while.’”
Bean again, on August 8: “Arabella ate her web last night, and spun another perfect one.”
Commander Bean on August 10: “Owen did the Spider TV three times today.”
The men and their cargo were orbiting Earth every other hour, curving 50 degrees north and south of the equator—ringing the parallels, rising and sinking. Their remaining tethers to the Earth were the kind that are difficult to pull on—teleprinter dispatches, the transmitted sinusoidal waves of their wives’ voices, the electric grid of Enid, Oklahoma, which blinked for Garriott when his hometown knew he was passing overhead. And though their distance never increased from the day they docked, the human cargo drifted further with each spacewalk, each tube of liquid spaghetti, each wrench slipping from their fingers that they no longer reflexively reached out to catch.
August 11 was supposedly the crew’s day off, but none of the three wanted rest. Neither did Arabella, who spun another lovely web—her fourth in as many days. Garriott had taken to calling her “our friend Arabella” and noted the day before that she was “near a very large horizon at this point.” In his transmission back to Earth on August 12, he described his friend moving her web from the corners of her cage to front and center—a much more telegenic place—where it stretched ever closer to the webs of home. There was a delighted lilt in his voice when he reported how, “without the benefit of previous experience and simply working on her own, she figured out a very nice solution to the problems of zero gravity.”
Houston woke the men every “morning” with news updates, but the crew knew the worst events of the day were always missing. NASA had arranged for Skylab to hear of no plane crash at Logan Airport, no coup in Chile, no serial killer found 15 miles from the very control room that shot their news into the sky. Back on Earth, Skylab was, of course, making its own headlines—at least an article a day on the men and their work hounding comets and setting records for nights slept in orbit. And most of the stories found a way to weave into their paragraphs news of the little spider in the TV-ready box.
Footage of her spinning aired on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. Her image, perched at the center of an impressive silver-toned web, ran in Science News, the Los Angeles Times, and along the AP wire. With each web spun, observed, photographed, and transmitted, things became stickier between Arabella, the astronauts, and the people of Earth. NASA had planned to let her die in space after a few days, but as the Washington Post said, Arabella had “earned the affection of the crew” so completely that, “midway through the flight, Owen Garriott asked what could be done to prolong that relationship.”
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p; Who could possibly condemn to death the weaver of the universe’s first space web? A creature that journalist Lee Edson called “probably the most distinguished spider in the world”? And how could anyone be surprised when Edson announced, “NASA has made another high-level decision. Arabella will be permitted to return to Earth with the astronauts on September 25.”
By then, Mission Control had its own mascot spider, Arachne, living in a glass cage in the Command Center. They could look at her when they heard Garriott in space, describing his friend Arabella. They radioed an order for Garriott to set aside a housefly-sized morsel of that evening’s space-dinner: filet mignon. “When Arabella is in her cage, carefully place a piece near her legs,” ordered CAPCOM Richard Truly. According to the New York Times, “The spider loved it, and proceeded to build another web.”
Each new web held the planet tighter in her grip. Only Arabella could bridge the distance between all earthbound creatures and the incomprehensible developments of Skylab—the X-ray maps of the galaxy, the Technicolor evidence of holes in the sun. As she steadied her slow steps along the straight line of her web and gripped the solid products of her body for support, she was walking back to what the people of Earth could understand: an organic narrative of success amid what on TV and in the papers must have seemed a dark and unnatural nebula. She did so naked, assisted by nothing but the tangible: her legs, her cage, the light bulb someone turned on for her every 18 hours. Dogged and stealthy, the spider created an earthly object in that wild and distant nothing. And alongside all the work of the floating men, her work was weighty and familiar—a lifeline tailor-made for the people of Earth.
For a spider in the center of her web is less distant from you than a man backflipping through a spaceship in his underwear. For a man in space is a decorated navy pilot in alien coveralls, unraveling a Golden Fleece to save his billion-dollar ship from frying in the nearby sun. For the spider in space still only knows a garden sun. She lifts the same eight unsheathed legs that tread any apple branch. She isn’t an honorary Doctor of Science or a Fellow at the American Astronomical Society. She’s never seen the Earth while standing on its moon.
For a spider in space has no title, just the sweet name of one of our daughters. When we speak it, the name makes the sound of a bell in the air.
Commander Alan Bean retired a few years after splashdown to start a painting career, and nearly every canvas he finishes is a scene in oil of a man on the moon. After commanding a space shuttle voyage in the early 1980s, Pilot Jack Lousma ran for state senator and lost. Owen Garriott returned to space a decade after Skylab, then helped send his son to the International Space Station 25 years later—the first American to pass space travel down a generation.
Arabella made it back to Earth, but just barely. According to NASA, they found the spider curled into a ball in her transport vial the day after splashdown. “An autopsy will be performed,” reassured Reuters. It ruled dehydration as the cause of her death, and then there was nothing else to do but catalogue her with the rest of the Skylab data.
Preserved in formalin and arranged in a black cylinder with a Plexiglas viewing front, she’s now item A19740484001 in the National Air and Space Museum’s collection, occasionally on display with Skylab’s other equipment. Among the titanium alloy, the neoprene, the epoxy-resin ablative, and the resin-impregnated fiberglass honeycomb, she is the rare logged item listed as “organic matter.”
Though he’s outlived her by over 40 years, Garriott has not forgotten the spider. In 2013, he sat on a NASA panel held for the 40th anniversary of Skylab—a panel that also included a science pilot from the contemporary space station. When this younger scientist referenced early work with animals in microgravity, Garriott, now a vigorous eighty-two-year-old, all but interrupted him. He sat forward in his chair and pushed his words out faster than he could pronounce them. His blue eyes widened as he looked into the small crowd of reporters and students. “Does the name Arabella ring a bell with any of you?”
Behind him was a large projection of the official Skylab III mission patch, which had been sewn to the shoulders of all Skylab personnel. The circular patch is a take on Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, in his notorious power stance. Behind the naked man is a circle half filled with a globe and half filled with a flaming sun. The man seems to float in the center of the patch, splitting the blue and the orange. He reaches to the edges of the frame with all eight of his appendages.
ED YONG
Tiny Jumping Spiders Can See the Moon
from The Atlantic
Last Wednesday, a spider fell onto Jamie Lomax’s laptop. Two days later, it happened again. Soon enough, several spiders were crawling across the ceiling of her office. “It was a little unnerving,” says Lomax, who’s an astronomer at the University of Washington. “I’m not scared of spiders but if someone else wants to take care of the spider in a room, I’ll gladly let them do it over me. And I don’t really want them raining down on my head.”
Lomax identified the abseiling arachnids as zebra jumping spiders, and tweeted about her experiences with the hashtag #ItIsRainingSpidersNotMen. And after considering options including “nukes and fire,” she settled for notifying her university. They sent over an exterminator, who failed to find any lingering spiders within the ceiling. He figured that a nest had probably hatched, and the newborn spiders had scattered. “But a couple of hours later, there were still spiders everywhere,” she tells me. “As of yesterday, there still were.”
Meanwhile, fellow astronomer Alex Parker had read Lomax’s tweets. “Have you tried lasers?” he replied. “Seriously though, some jumping spiders will chase laser pointers like cats do.”
There are, indeed, many YouTube videos of them doing exactly that. But Emily Levesque—Lomax’s colleague, with an office two doors down—wanted to see it for herself. “She has a laser pointer and she happens to be the only other person with spiders in her office,” says Lomax. “She ran down to me and said: You have to see this.”
Being scientists, Lomax and Levesque tested laser pointers of different colors. They found that the zebra spiders seemed to be mildly interested in a red dot but completely transfixed by a green one. They even tried using both lasers at the same time—and the spiders seemed to prefer green over red.
“Do all zebra spiders react more to green vs red laser pointers?” Levesque tweeted. “We need some kind of ‘science Twitter’ bat signal that we can put up when different fields need input from one another.”
But on Twitter, no such signal is necessary. Last night, spider researcher Catherine Scott saw the thread and looped in her friend Nate Morehouse, who studies spider vision at the University of Cincinnati. Morehouse was up late watching the Stanley Cup final and was distraught to see his team, the Pittsburgh Penguins, losing to the Nashville Predators. “I was all bummed out, and I decided to check Twitter before I went to bed,” he says. “I had like 150 notifications.”
“We can explain all of this!” he wrote to Levesque. Jumping spiders are visual hunters, which track their prey with the large pair of eyes at the front of their heads. The retinas of those eyes contain two types of light-detecting cells—one that’s sensitive to ultraviolet light and another that’s sensitive to green light. The latter cells aren’t only sensitive to green light; they react to red too, just less strongly. So jumping spiders can see red light, but it would just appear as a dimmer form of green to them.
No one has really studied the eyes of the zebra jumping spider, says Morehouse, but based on what we know from other species, it should react to laser pointers in exactly the way that Levesque and Lomax found. “It’s not a controlled experiment, and the green laser might just be brighter or larger than the red one,” Morehouse tells me. “But if you had two equal laser pointers, one red and one green, we’d expect that the jumping spider should track the red one less enthusiastically.”
But there’s another reason why jumping spiders should fascinate astronomers, besides their occasional pench
ant for raining from the ceiling or chasing lasers. As Morehouse told Lomax and Levesque, their eyes “are built like . . . wait for it . . . Galilean telescopes.” These telescopes, which Galileo started using in 1609, are basically tubes with a lens at each end. Only three groups of animals have similar eyes: falcons, chameleons, and jumping spiders.
In the spider’s case, each of the two main eyes is topped with a large lens that’s fixed to the rest of the spider’s body. Beneath that is a long tube, filled with a clear gel. And at the bottom of the tube, the gel changes in a way that we still don’t understand, but that causes light to bend. It effectively acts like a second lens, even though there’s no distinct physical structure that you can dissect out.
The two lenses work in tandem: the top one collects and focuses light, while the bottom one spreads it out. This arrangement enlarges images before they hit the spider’s retina, which allows it to resolve a huge amount of detail for its size. A jumping spider can see objects as clearly as a pigeon or a small dog, even though its eye tube is less than a millimeter long, and its whole body gets no bigger than five millimeters.
Scientists know all of this because they can peer straight into a jumping spider’s eyes and study the retinas below. Those retinas have muscles and can swivel around like the back of a telescope, so the spider can change where it’s looking without moving its head. By watching them do this, and measuring their anatomy, people like Morehouse can work out how light travels through their eyes. And by extension, they can also calculate what sorts of things the spiders can see.