7 Astronauts Fly High in Orbit, Draw Blood in Name of Science

Columbia and its seven astronauts blasted off on a belated mission Monday, carrying 48 rats that will be poked, prodded and in some cases decapitated by guillotine and dissected in orbit.

All in the name of science.

The astronauts quickly got started on their 14 days of space checkups, drawing blood from one another, measuring their blood pressure and noting any symptoms of motion sickness.

The mission--the longest ever planned for a space shuttle--is intended to help scientists develop measures for counteracting the debilitating effects of space travel.

Despite the tests, everyone was flying high.

“As you can well imagine, there are seven very happy people up here,” commander John Blaha said.

Astronaut-physician David Wolf was the first one to enter the pressurized laboratory in the cargo bay, followed by the crew’s other medical doctor, M. Rhea Seddon.

NASA needed three countdowns to get Columbia off the ground. Equipment failures halted last week’s attempts.

“Guys, the third time’s a charm,” orbiter test director Brian Monborne assured the crew before liftoff.

Delayed 10 seconds by a stray Navy plane, the 2,000-ton spaceship rose from its seaside pad at 7:53 a.m. PDT and tore through three decks of clouds on its way to a 176-mile-high orbit.

Two crew members had catheters threading through their veins for launch--Martin Fettman, the first U.S. veterinarian in space, and Shannon Lucid, a biochemist who became the first woman to fly in space four times. The catheters were hooked to white backpacks with floating cables, making the two look like a pair of bees.

Throughout the mission, Fettman and the others will draw blood from the 2- to 3-month-old male rodents, inject isotopes and hormones, and collect the animal droppings to measure calcium content, an indicator of bone loss.

On Oct. 30, Fettman will use a guillotine to behead five rats, six if there’s time. He and another astronaut then will perform the first animal dissections in space, preserving almost everything for post-flight analysis: brain, eyes, inner ears, parts of the skull, spleen, heart, liver, kidneys, pancreas, thyroid, lungs, trachea, bones, muscles, blood, glands, testes.

Biologists say the only way to know exactly how weightlessness affects creatures is to dissect them before they’re exposed again to gravity.