Learn about sexual activity in space

Consider just one factor-sex. NASA psychologist B.J Bluth likens a short spaceflight to a date, a long one to marriage. Maybe a Mars crew should consist entirely of married couples. An element of stability, of old-show comfort, would be introduced by having one's husband or wife to fall back on. Certainly a singles-bar atmosphere, a charged mixture of sexually unattached cimpetitors would be a disaster. An all-male or all-female crew would alleviate some of these problems but would clearly introduce others. In the final analysis, sex may be ignored and the selection made on the basis of competency alone.

Cole Porter put it this way " Birds do it, bees do it...Let's do it. Let's fall in love." If human nature holds true to form, place travelers will do it too. At least that's how experts like Dr. Patricia Santy, a psychiatrist at the University of Texas in Galveston feel. "It's foolish and perhaps dangerous to pretend that a long-duration mission will differ from any office where you have men and women working together," she recentyly told The New York Time. "Sex is a normal part of human behavior. It happens in office. It happens in Antartica. It happens wherever you have males and females.

So far the study of the need, likelihood, or advisability of sex in space remains unexplorated territory. Neither NASA nor any other space agency has seriously addressed the question. But talk to assigning crew members of both sexes to the planned international space station Freedom, and renewed dicussions of long missions to Mars, have made it difficult to ignore the issue any longer.

Approaches to the problem have ranged from assigning crews of all men or all women to sending only married coupples to avoiding the question altogether. Former Apollo astronaut Michael Collins recommends sending married couples to Mars. "An element of old shoe comfort," he writes in his book, Mission to Mars, "would introduced by having one's husband or wife to fall back on" rather than what he calls a disastrous mixture of unattached competitors cooped up in a ship with nowhere to go.

In fact the possibility of a lovers' spat or an all-out fistfight with a lover or over a lover somewhere between Earth and Mars during a multibillion-dollar mission is a chilling prospect. On the other hand, can human beings really be expected to go without sex for nine months to three years in such close quarters and under such difficult circumstances?

There are other problems associated wit the issue. Contraception, for example. In a weightless environmen, the effective and effectivemness will be a paramount. "Space may not be the best lace to get pregnant," says Dr. Lynn Wiley, a reproductive biologist at the Unicersity of California at Favis. Not only could it endanger the mission, but the effects of radiation and weightlessness could harm the fetus.

But what if the crew members do decide to have sex during the mission? Aside from the psycological and sociological issues, there are the problems of privacy. Then there is the question of actually coupling in weightlessness. Newton's third law of motion applies in a boudior in space as well as on Earth, except with more interesting results. Lovemaking in zero gravity is likely to bring a great many reactions, with couples catapulting off the walls, and the floors, and careenining into the airlocks if their inty cubicles during the heat of passion.

The accoutrements of old-fashioned romance will also be difficult to come by. Flowers in space will be rare and champagne is out of the question unless the couple is willing to drink it from a straw and put it up with the momumental case of zero-gravity-induced gas that would follow. Candlelight or cigarettes aftervard? Not in space, not with all of those oxygen tanks around. In general, it's a situation that could give new meaning to Shakespeare's old phrase, "star-crosed lovers."