First spider web in space
Who
Arabella and Anita
What
first
Where
Not Applicable ()

Arabella and Anita, two female cross spiders (Araneus diadematus), were sent into space in 1973 on the Skylab 3 mission to the US Skylab space station. The experiment, to see how spiders would spin webs in weightlessness, was suggested by Judy Miles, a US student. While the spiders did indeed construct normal looking webs, the silk was finer than on Earth, and with differences in thickness, unlike terrestrial spider silk, which has uniform thickness.