Mary Roach - Packing for Mars

AN ENTIRE FLEDGLING INDUSTRY has been launched on the imaginations of people like my agent. Space Tourism Society president John Spencer envisions an orbiting “super yacht” featuring “Snuggle Tunnels” and a zero-gravity hot tub. Budget Suites America founder Robert Bigelow, now heading up Bigelow Aerospace in Las Vegas, has begun testing and launching inflatable components for a “commercial space station” to be leased out for research, industrial testing, and space vacations and honeymoons. [77]Bigelow hopes to be open for business in 2015.

In theory, one shouldn’t have to wait for Bigelow’s hotel rooms or Spencer’s superyacht. What fascinates most people about sex in space is not the altitude of the participants but the fact that they’re weightless. That being the case, a parabolic flight might do the trick. Though you’d experience it in twenty-second intervals sandwiched between the medically risky intervals where you both weigh twice your usual weight.

Since 1993, the Zero G Corporation has been running commercial parabolic flights on a fleet of Boeing 727s. Have any of the weightless also been pantsless? The man I spoke to, who has since left the company and wishes to remain anonymous, said sex on the plane was most decidedly not an option. Zero G had begun contracting with NASA to take college students and schoolteachers up on reduced-gravity flights to promote the space program among students. If the company started letting people have sex in the plane, NASA would be extravagantly disinclined to renew the contract. Besides, the interested couple would need to charter the entire plane, at a cost of $95,000.

I am not the first to have inquired. Someone from the Mile High Club had contacted Zero G “on many occasions” about renting the plane. This is not so much a formal club with bylaws and dues as a Web site where people who’ve “joined the club” by having sex on an airplane can go to post their stories. If anyone had had weightless sex on a parabolic flight, you’d think this organization would know about it.

“We are unaware of anyone having attempted this feat,” said Phil, the man who answers mail sent to the Mile High Club Web site. “If you find what you are looking for, please let us know so we can post it on the site.” Phil attached two photographs of a pair of nameless young parachutists having sex during free fall. Their position was fairly conventional—for sex, if not for skydiving: man sitting, woman astride. The one concession to their unusual aerodynamic circumstances was that the man’s arms were flung out behind him, for stability. Diverting, but not a particularly good analog for zero gravity. The force of the wind blast against the man’s naked backside would have acted like a surface, creating resistance for the pair to push against. I’m curious as to whether the man ended up with a bout of ram-air flatulence, but not especially curious about the sex.

Only pornographers are suitably motivated to take on the expense of chartering an entire plane for the prospect of weightless sex. Playboy has contacted the Zero G Corporation, as did a producer at Girls Gone Wild. “You wouldn’t believe how hard they tried and how much they offered,” said my contact, of Girls Gone Wild. The producer and crew ended up chartering a plane in Russia, though no one had sex. It’s just more shots of girls displaying their unfettered bosoms, this time additionally unfettered by gravity.

Some months later, leafing through a European magazine called Colors , I saw a reference to a 1999 porn film called The Uranus Experiment , whose producer had apparently chartered a jet for a parabolic flight. “As the plane dived to earth, there was just enough time to film their copulation scene.” The star of the film was a Czech actress named Silvia Saint. Could Ms. Saint be the first human being to have had weightless intercourse?

Though Silvia Saint has a healthy presence on the Internet, her email address proved elusive. An acquaintance who writes a popular online sex column suggested reaching out to a well-connected “adult PR person” she knows named Brian Gross. (Because I am not an adult, I took delight not only in the name but in the job description, imagining an alternate category of “child PR person” and wishing that some of them worked at NASA.) A glance at Mr. Gross’s client endorsements marked him as a man of great versatility, having represented, at one time or another, both ABC News and Booble: The Adult Search Engine. Mr. Gross provided a lead, which led to another, who said that Saint had left the industry five years ago, [78] At the time she retired, Saint had been in more than two hundred pornographic movies. Though one or two have a hint of class (e.g., the Kubrickian-sounding Mouth Wide Open ), the bulk of the filmography (e.g., Hot Bods and Tail Pipe #14 , The Adventures of Pee Man ) suggests that Silvia Saint, at age thirty-three, had earned a rest. “moved back to the Czech Republic, and dropped off the face of the earth.”

Next stop, Berth Milton, the man whose Barcelona company, the Private Media Group, produced The Uranus Experiment . Milton, an affable family man with an unplaceable accent, arranged to have downloads of the Uranus films (it’s a trilogy!) sent to me and promised to help track down Ms. Saint. The plane upon which the historic act had transpired, he said, was part of a fleet of corporate jets, of which Mr. Milton owned a timeshare.

“You asked a corporate jet pilot to fly parabolas?” I said.

“Exactly.”

“Had the pilot ever done this before?”

“No.” This was surprising information. But Milton went on about the wear and tear on the jet engines, and how the plane was grounded for two days afterward for inspection and maintenance, and so I chose to believe him.

Milton hadn’t been there, so he couldn’t remember details from the zero-gravity scenes. This was ten years ago, after all, and Private Media was then releasing ten movies a month. He did recall the cameraman, who was notable among his kind for having been, at one time, a cameraman for Ingmar Bergman.

Milton added that he didn’t care for Bergman. “He won a lot of awards, but nobody was looking at his movies. He’s just depressing. There’s no joy.”

I mentioned Fanny and Alexander .

“Okay, that’s probably the only one that you could watch the whole movie. The rest are terrible.”

I have to admit that I felt more joy while watching The Uranus Experiment 1 than I did watching The Seventh Seal . The film opens with a cosmonaut sitting naked on an examining table at the Russian space agency. A white adhesive EKG electrode is stuck to his chest like a nicotine patch. It is an odd touch, given that he’s there to deliver a semen sample. In the next room, jowly Russian space agency men discuss a top-secret experiment “to find out how zero G affects the sperm production.” Cut to a blonde in a snug white lab coat, a test tube dangling from her manicured fingertips. “Hello,” she says. “What a beautiful organ you have there.”

I fast-forwarded through this scene and the one at NASA (here pronounced Nassau ) headquarters, wherein we learn how the agency chooses its female interns. (An aerospace degree appears unnecessary.) I stopped fast-forwarding at the point where the action moves to zero gravity. Two orbiting space shuttles, one Russian and one American, have commenced a belly-to-belly docking maneuver. Even the spacecraft are having sex.

The hatch between the two craft is barely opened and the two crews have their flight suits off. Silvia Saint is holding vertical, bobbing up and down as though taking a dip in a mild chop. Hang on. Hold the phone. Her ponytail is hanging down her back, and other things are hanging down her front. Without gravity, there should be no hangy-downy. This wasn’t shot in zero G! The actors’ lower legs are hidden behind a console; they’re just rising up and down on their toes and waving their arms in the air.