What Is The NASA Spider Experiment & Did It Really Happen?
NASA is well-known for its continued research of outer space — but did you know the organization also once conducted a famous spider experiment? Since NASA's founding back in 1958, NASA has stood out as one of the biggest names in space exploration. It sent the first humans to the Moon, landed the first rover on Mars, and helped create important instruments like Hubble and Chandra.
As with any big government organization, there's a lot of interest in NASA's future plans, current missions, and what it's done in the past. Unfortunately, this also means it's not uncommon to find misinformation about NASA. One of the biggest myths is that NASA was originally created to explore Earth's oceans — and then immediately stopped and started researching space to try and find a way off the planet. It's an intriguing and mysterious story, but it's also completely false.
Another tale that's made the rounds online is this NASA spider experiment. Users on Twitter and TikTok claim that NASA performed a test in the late 90s to study the effects of drugs on spiders. NASA allegedly gave spiders a variety of different drugs, looked at how this affected their webs, and got some pretty incredible results out of it. As strange of a story as it is, the craziest part is that it's actually true.
The NASA spider experiment was originally published in the NASA Tech Briefs publication on April 1, 1995. The spider experiment was conducted by a group of NASA researchers, including David A. Noever, Noever, Raymond J. Cronise, and Rachna A. Relwani. Based out of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, the research team used the spider experiment to see how certain chemicals affected the way spiders weaved their webs.
The results of the test are seen in the image above. The leftmost web is the experiment's control sample and shows a web created by a normal spider not affected by any chemicals. As NASA starts introducing different chemicals, the structure of the webs becomes more and more chaotic. A spider affected by marijuana was able to create a somewhat 'normal' web structure in the center, but the outer parts quickly dissolve into a jumbled mess. The webs get even worse with benzedrine, caffeine, and chloral hydrate. In fact, the caffeine and chloral hydrate webs hardly look like webs at all. As NASA explained at the time, "It appears that one of the most telling measures of toxicity is a decrease, in comparison with a normal web, of the numbers of completed sides in the cells: the greater the toxicity, the more sides the spider fails to complete."
While NASA hasn't conducted any other spider experiments since 1995, this was a real research project that the organization undertook. It collected a bunch of spiders, drugged them, and studied how it altered their web-weaving. NASA's sights are now more focused on sending humans back to the Moon and finally landing them on Mars, but its bizarre spider experiment is just as much a part of its history as anything else.
Source: NASA