Another spider story - Willie the Spidernaut......a work in progress

The story of 

Willie the Spidernaut

John Paull 1969

Background

David Hawkins

In 1969, when working with David Hawkins at the Mountain View Center for Environmental Education, based at the University of Colorado in Boulder, I visited a number of elementary schools in Boulder School District. At the time of the impending first landing on the moon, I was spending at least one day a week in the first and second grade classroom at Lincoln School. The daily talk, of course,  was of the silver rocket taking men way, way up to the moon. 

The lunar mission fulfilled President John Kennedy's goal of reaching the moon by the end of the 1960s, which he had expressed during a speech given before a joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961: 

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth."

The kids were really excited. And so was I. After all, history was being made.....

The Apollo 11 mission was the first human spaceflight  to land on the moon. Launched on July 16, 1969, the rocket carried Mission Commander Neil Alden Armstrong, Command Module Pilot Michael Collins, and Lunar Module Pilot,  Edwin Eugene 'Buzz' Aldrin.  On July 20, Armstrong and Aldrin became the first humans to land on the Moon, while Collins orbited above.

Jeannie and Patti put together a display of books and magazines about the flight.

This is what I wrote in my journal:

Benji and the spidernaut –  1969

Lincoln reminds me of the best of Leicestershire schools. Every time I visit the incredibly well resourced classroom, I see children engaged and working individually or in groups, alone or with a teacher. They are reading, writing, constructing with blocks, cooking, painting, exploring science or mathematical materials, watching small animals in a terrarium, making electrical circuits to light bulbs for a building made from a shoebox, making and flying paper airplanes  and kits – and much more.

The two teachers, Jeanne and Patti, think very carefully about the mechanics of running their classroom, just one part of a teacher’s job. They know their students, they trust and respect them and they expect them to learn. They build a true community in which everyone has a role to play.

Jeanne and Patti spend time together before and after school preparing the room for each and every day. They use junk materials creatively, feeding off the excitement that is generated when teachers and children work well together – in short, everything that makes all the hard organizational tasks worthwhile.

I come to observe, to learn and to interact with the kids and the teachers.

One afternoon when I was working with a group of kids, one of them spotted a spider walking across the carpet. I picked it up and held it safely in my hand.

The kids were fascinated. They came close to see the spider and asked a thousand questions. “What is it? Where does it live? Will it sting? Can we touch it?”  I put the spider into a clean jam jar and talked about making a ‘real’ home for it. As we looked at it clambering around the slippery jar, I asked out loud:

"What did it need? Where would it sleep? Did it need a friend? How and what does it drink?”

There was an old bookcase in the corridor that no one seemed to want, so, that evening, Patti, Jeanne and I took it apart. We took out the shelves, lined the inside with plastic sheeting, added soil, plants and a light, screwed a huge sheet of Perspex to the front, and, hey, there was the most beautiful spider home you can imagine.

Willie's new luxury home

When the kids came in the next day, they were SO excited.                                                  

The excitement grew when the spider, now named Willie, built her first web. The excitement became intense when she caught and ate her first fly.

Man on the Moon

 On July 16^th, the Apollo mission was launched and was televised live. We watched its launch in the classroom. The kids were totally engrossed.

A few days later (July 20^th) we sat, mesmorised, and watched the moon-landing. There was such excitement as the astronaut bounced around on the surface of the moon. The kids were absolutely spellbound.

Later, one student, 8 year old Benji, was so taken up with the landing on the moon that he constructed a large rocket from boxes, with perfectly fitting nosecone.

Benji adding the cone to the top of the rocket

He was soon joined by another lad who wanted to build a Russian Rocket, hearing that the Russians, too, were thinking of launching a rocket to the moon (his family was from Russia, I believe).

Eventually, they decided to combine their talents and work together to build the BEST rocket that it was possible to make. I helped them gather cardboard boxes from around the school, gave them a couple of rolls of tape and left them alone to make their rocket.

When the rocket was close to being finished, the boys came to me and asked if they could launch fly a living creature in their rocket. We talked about it and then asked the class. Everyone agreed we should fly Willie, our classroom spider, providing that there was no possibility we would hurt her.

Another question, for me, in particular, was HOW could we fly a huge cardboard box rocket? Mmmmm.....

Robin Hood provided the answer. We would launch our rocket in the same way an arrow is launched from a bow.

Outside the classroom were two big trees growing closely together – we could launch our rocket by sitting it on a length of rubber suspended between the trees.

Willie the Spider needed preparing for her trip, so we read about the training program for astronauts, amending it for Willie. She successfully completed her training, and, with great care, she was carefully placed in her matchbox (lined with soft felt and a moth for dinner) container, placed in the nosecone, and was subsequently launched in the rocket at 4:00 p.m. on July 20th. 

A crowd of forty plus children cheered as the rocket took off, headed toward the late afternoon sun.  The rocket 'flew' to a height of, say, two feet, tumbled, and fell to the ground. The crowd applauded, then went quiet. “Willie!! Where's Willie?“ they shouted.  Benji ran to the fallen rocket, took off the nosecone and removed the matchbox,

Willie was alive! The crowd went wild.

After the rescue, Willie the Orb Spider, and, for a few seconds, Willie the Astrospider, was retired to the huge (and very appropriately designed) spider home in the back of the classroom.

Then the children gathered around in a circle on the carpet, and we wrote Willie’s story on a large sheet of paper to hang on the wall.

The Poster

We knew where to get a spider to send up in our rocket. 

We found the spider and we named him Willie. 

We put him through lots of tests, seeing how much roughness he could   take, the heat test, and the falling test. 

Willie passed all the tests and he we sent him up in the rocket. It tumbled in the air and fell down.

And he was alive. 

Willie then went back in his big spider home and lived a long time.

The following day, I helped Benji write to NASA. He described his rocket launching experience and asked:

Dear Nasa and dear Astronauts,   
We launched a spider into space. 
WHY don't you launch a spider into space?  We did!!  
We can show you how to do it!!  

Love, Benji.
Lincoln Elementary School

Disappointingly, we never got a reply.

To keep the momentum going in the classroom, I did  some research, discovering that:

• Fruit flies were first sent into space in 1947, aboard a V2 rocket launched by the US to explore the effects of radiation exposure at high altitudes
• Albert I, a rhesus monkey, became the first primate in space in 1948 but, sadly, he died of suffocation. Albert II, launched the following year, died on his return journey to Earth.
• A stray mongrel dog from Moscow called Laika became the first dog to go into orbit in 1957 but died a few days into her mission
• France launched a stray black and white tomcat into space in 1963. Felix, the first cat in space, had electrodes fitted in his head to measure neural impulses. I’m glad to say that he returned safely
• Another satellite launched by the US in 1970 carried two bullfrogs. They were kept in a water-filled centrifuge to test the effect of gravitational fields on them and the inner ear's balance mechanism. They were never recovered.

A year later, when I went back to England, I celebrated the launching of Willie the spider, flying another in a hot air balloon, over the top of a school I was visiting. 

 Later, in 1973, I read that Anita and Arabella, two female cross spiders were launched into orbit destined for the Skylab 3 space station. They were used in experiments that evaluated their web building skills in near zero gravity among others things. They died before completing their tasks.

And, more recently (November, 2008) another space mission carried another spider in space. Like all astronauts, the two spiders aboard space shuttle mission STS-126 went through a rigorous selection process, fitness tests and hours of training to prepare them for their scheduled launch tonight. Joining a human crew of seven, the orb-weaver spiders were strapped into a special compartment aboard the shuttle Endeavour when it blasted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Their destination was the International Space Station, where they remained for the next three months, circling Earth more than 1,300 times at 17,500mph..

The spiders were one of two educational experiments designed by The University of Colorado-Boulder's BioServe Space Technologies that flew on Endeavour's mission.

The purpose of the spider experiment was to compare the web spinning and feeding of spiders in space with that of spiders on the ground. Over a dozen Colorado middle schools monitored the progress of the experiments through the videos, data, and images sent back from the ISS.

While the astronauts set to work on expanding the space station and plumbing in a new system that will allow future crews to recycle urine as drinking water, the spiders were busy dealing with the issues of near zero gravit. They eventually worked out how to make a perfect orb web and caught the fruit flies that had emerged from the larvae placed in the dog food at the bottom of their special home.