SPIDERNAUT

The story of an experiment designed to answer a high school student’s question to NASA.

Told in first person—perhaps not the best choice as the arachnid narrator is called upon to describe her own death and subsequent events in the later going—the chronicle begins in 1972 with a query about whether spiders can spin webs in space. Popped into small tubes with dead flies for provisions, Arabella and another orb spider, Anita, were transported to Skylab 3 in 1973 and released into cages where, after a day or so of floating and a “wonky” preliminary effort, both actually produced creditable versions of their earthly webs. A better title for this might be Spiders in Space, because along with a tally of scientific findings, Arabella goes on post-mortem to describe several later visits to the International Space Station by various eight-legged relatives (one of whom, a Johnson jumping spider named Nefertiti, actually “made it home again” in 2012). “That’s one small step for man but one giant leap for spiders!” she concludes. The simple illustrations largely tend to close-ups of Arabella, and if all of the adults in view seem to be White, Kordić does tuck in one late scene of a racially diverse trio of modern young children comparing a “spidernaut” with a specimen in a classroom terrarium.

A true tale of life in space, ably if not spectacularly spun.