Mary Roach - Packing for Mars

Unlike the spotted seal, astronauts have not been put in a swimming pool for the purposes of figuring out how it’s done. Regardless of what the late G. Harry Stine says in his book Living in Space :

Back in the 1980s, some clandestine experiments were conducted very late at night in the neutral buoyancy weightless simulation tank at NASA’s George C. Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The experimental results showed that yes, it is indeed possible for humans to copulate in weightlessness. However, they have trouble staying together. The covert researchers discovered that it helped to have a third person to push at the right time in the right place. The anonymous researchers…discovered that this is the way dolphins do it. A third dolphin is always present during the mating process. This led to the creation of the space-going equivalent of aviation’s Mile High Club known as the Three Dolphin Club.

Stine is best known for writing science fiction, and seemed unable to shake the habit while writing nonfiction. Or did someone at Marshall perhaps start the rumor? I wrote to a public affairs officer there to see if anyone could shed light on the story’s origins. Squirreliness ensued: “Hi, Mary. I’m including our historian, Mike Wright, on this email as he can probably fill you in on some historical information about the Neutral Buoyancy Lab. The short answer is, yes, we used to have a Neutral Buoyancy Lab at the Marshall Center, but it was closed (Mike can provide dates) and the work was subsequently done at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.” It was as though my email had made no mention of sex or G. Harry Stine.

Based on his dolphin accuracy quotient, Stine is not to be trusted. In the words of America’s preeminent dolphin expert, Randall Wells, “Only two dolphins are required for mating.” Upon further pestering, Wells noted that a second male sometimes helps corral a female but no helpful coital pushing has been observed. One possible reason a third dolphin isn’t called for is that the dolphin’s penis is prehensile. [75] They can literally grasp things—including, on occasion, people who have paid to swim with the dolphins. “There have been cases in captivity when males…have gripped the person around the ankle with their penis,” said dolphin researcher Janet Mann. Mann said male dolphins have quietly been eliminated from most of the programs for this reason. If the Web site Sex with Dolphins is to be believed, females do it too. “She suddenly decided to grab my foot with her genital slit,” writes the author, going on to explain that females not only have muscular vaginal orifices but can use these muscles to “manipulate objects and carry them.” What a boon for the limbless! I wanted to ask Mann what objects dolphins have been seen to carry with their genitals, but she had by this point begun dodging my emails. Georgetown University dolphin researcher Janet Mann told me it can “hook into the female” and keep her close for the few seconds the male needs to finish his business. However, it was Mann’s feeling that the males needed this advantage not so much because it was hard to stay coupled while floating, but because females usually roll over and try to escape. From what I hear about male astronauts, this is not an issue.

As for the research experiment Stine described, it makes little sense. Why would NASA employees risk losing their jobs when the same “experiment” could be carried out in a backyard swimming pool? And why would you even need a formal experiment? As astronaut Roger Crouch said, in an email, a couple that wanted to have sex in space would simply do what couples on Earth do: “just start out and get better by experience.”

As for Stine’s claim about participants having “trouble staying together,” Crouch was dismissive. “Nothing restricts the use of arms and legs to manipulate or cling to each other. Once one of the participants has attached his or her feet or body firmly”—and here he suggested duct tape if all else failed—“the rest would be up to the imagination of the participants. The Kama Sutra couldn’t start to cover all the possibilities.”

I had written to Crouch about a different sex-in-space Internet hoax—NASA Publication 14-307-1792: a fabricated circa-1989 “post-flight summary” of the results of an exploration, supposedly carried out on shuttle mission STS-75, of “approaches to continued marital relations in the zero G orbital environment.” It was the first hoax I’ve ever come across that cited another hoax—Stine’s “similar experiments undertaken in a neutral buoyancy tank.”

With “a pneumatic sound-deadening barrier” erected between the decks for privacy, an astronaut couple supposedly tried out ten positions, four of them “natural,” and six involving mechanical restraints. Position No. 10 was one of two selected as “most satisfactory”: “Each partner gripping the other’s head between their thighs.” The report concluded with a recommendation to screen future astronaut couples based on “their ability to accept or adapt to the solutions used in runs 3 and 10” and a reference to a forthcoming astronaut sex training video. Incredibly, two authors of space books, over the years, swallowed the bait and presented Document 14-307-1792 as fact in their books. A quick visit to the NASA Web site would have revealed that shuttle mission STS-75 flew in 1996, seven years after the “document” appeared, and, P.S., had an all-male crew.

DOZENS OF ASTRONAUTS have flown on coed crews. One shuttle crew included a couple who’d fallen in love during training and tied the knot without telling NASA, just before their flight. It’s hard to imagine that all these men and women, without exception, have resisted temptation. Privacy may have been scarce on the Space Shuttle, but not on multimodule space stations like Mir and the International Space Station. Valery Polyakov and the fetching Yelena Kondakova spent five months together on Mir. “We were torturing Valery about whether they had sex,” cosmonaut Alexandr Laveikin told me. “He said, ‘Don’t ask these questions.’” Kondakova is married to cosmonaut Valery Ryumin, which helps explain why Polyakov would have needed to keep his flight suit, or his mouth, zipped. Laveikin shared a Russian saying that seems to have both lost and gained something in translation: “Mystery is the thing where love hides its arrows.” Or as space maven James Oberg put it (borrowing an old military aphorism): “Them what says, don’t know, and them what knows, don’t say.”

NASA doesn’t specifically address sex in its rules of conduct. Its Astronaut Code of Professional Responsibility includes a vague Boy Scout Oath–style pledge, “We will strive to avoid the appearance of impropriety.” To me, that just means, Don’t get caught. The ISS Crew Code of Conduct—which is actually part of the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations—is similarly circumspect: “No ISS crewmember shall… act in a manner which results in or creates the appearance of: (1) giving undue preferential treatment to any person or entity in the performance of ISS activities…” That is one way to look at a sexual dalliance: undue preferential treatment.

In reality, nothing needs to be spelled out or legislated. NASA is funded by taxpayer dollars. Like senators and presidents, astronauts are highly visible public servants. Sexual missteps and other breaches of moral etiquette are not easily forgiven. There would be headlines. Public outrage. Funding cuts. An astronaut knows this. Even if word of a zero-gravity hookup never made it past the ears of NASA, the parties involved would never fly again.

And so, as hard as it is to imagine that no astronaut has had sex in space, it is equally hard to imagine that they have. I tried to explain this to my agent Jay: The years of education and training. The anxiety of not knowing whether there will be another flight. The extraordinary commitment and devotion to career. There’s so much at stake, so much to lose. Jay listened to me, and then he said, “Might be worth it, no?” [76] This is the same man who, upon being shown a panoramic photograph of a hauntingly beautiful Martian landscape, remarked, “It looks like the outskirts of Las Vegas.” Funny he should say that. As I write this, funding efforts are underway for a $1.6 billion Mars World resort in the desert outside Las Vegas.