By Bill Scanlon, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)
Published November 10, 2008 at 12:30 p.m.
Updated November 10, 2008 at 12:30 p.m.

Butterflies and spiders have life wired on Earth, but how will they do in the near weightlessness of outer space?

Colorado school children will help NASA astronauts and scientists find out when the Space Shuttle Endeavor launches Friday with plenty of eight-legged and multi-legged animals on board.

The school kids will monitor what happens to spiders and butterflies on Earth at the same time as the mission scientists see what happens in space.

Will the complicated life cycle of the butterfly — larvae to pupa to butterfly to egg — skip a beat if there's no gravity?

Will spiders still be able to weave their orb-like symmetrical webs in a weightless environment?

The two experiments were designed and built at the University of Colorado's BioServe Space Technologies.

This will be the third shuttle flight in which BioServe's K-12 educational program known will bring "actual actual space flight experiments into the K-12 classroom," said Louis Stodieck, who is director of BioServe and principal investigator of the project.

More than a dozen middle schools from Colorado's Front Range — including Denver Public Schools and St. Vrain Valley — will participate, as well as several middle schools in Texas.

BioServe will download video, still images and data from the space station to its educational partners, including the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, the Butterfly Pavilion in Westminster and the Baylor College School of Medicine.

On Earth and in space, several painted-lady butterflies will be fed nectar while observers see if they can complete the life cycle.

The experiments will begin with four-day-old larvae.

The spiders will get to munch on live fruit flies and sip water while they try to spin webs and catch food in near-zero-gravity free fall.

The suitcase-sized payload will include habitats for the spiders and butterflies.

Among those helping on the project are Paula Cushing, curator of invertebrate zoology for the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, and Mary Ann Hamilton, curator of the Butterfly Pavilion.

Since 1991 BioServe has flown payloads on 29 space shuttle microgravity space missions, including experiments that have been tethered to the International Space Station and Russia's Mir Space Station.