Happy Valentine’s Day! In honor of today’s deeply commercialized celebration of romantic love, let’s talk about sex in space. Today’s issue might not be suitable for some readers, because (a) it’s about sex in space, and (b) I’m going to discuss issues of consent. However, I won’t be getting more explicit than a PG-13 rating, because my parents read this newsletter.
How would sex in space be different from sex on Earth? There are some significant biological changes that might affect the process, specifically the redistribution of blood due to weightlessness, which can reduce blood flow to areas of the body below the diaphragm. But there’s also the more general problem of physics: most of our everyday human movement, particularly coordinated movement between two or more humans, depends on gravity and friction. Without a floor (or other flat surface) to push against, participants are at the mercy of Newton’s third law, which states that thrusting in one direction will shove you backwards in the opposite direction with the same force (although he didn’t word it in quite the same way). You can imagine how that would make things tricky and might require the use of more creative methods or tools.
Humans have been going to space for decades; surely someone’s actually tried this by now, right? People have certainly been speculating on the interpersonal activities of astronauts for some time, because the public loves a salacious story even more than they love astronauts. NASA denies that humans have had sex in space, and astronauts themselves tend to avoid the topic (I can’t blame them). There have been plenty of hoaxes and rumors to the contrary, especially after American astronauts Jan Davis and Mark Lee got married before their Shuttle mission in 1992. They were both allowed to fly the mission together due to the difficulties of replacing one or both of them so close to the launch, but NASA formalized its unwritten policy against assigning married astronauts to the same mission soon afterwards. Lee and Davis have been plagued with questions about their post-marital flight activities ever since (even after their divorce in 1999), but have declined to comment.
More recently, Marc and Sharon Hagle became the first married couple to reach space in a commercial spacecraft, taking a Blue Origin suborbital trip together last year. Which hints at potential upcoming changes to our current track record of platonic human spaceflight: civilian passengers and guests on commercial spacecraft and orbital hotels will, presumably, be free to perform their own joint physics experiments, regardless of marital status.
This raises concerns about the potential results of these experiments: space agencies have so far avoided studying human reproduction in space for a number of reasons including cost, astronaut privacy, and ethical problems with experimenting on fetuses. There’s a lot more to be said regarding human reproduction in space, but since this is the Valentine’s Day issue and not the one for Mother’s or Father’s Day, let’s stick to the purely recreational part for now. Surely that’s all fun and games, right? What kind of ethical issues could there be with non-reproductive zero-g relations in space, especially once the spacecraft get big enough to allow for some privacy? The same issues there are with sex on Earth: namely, consent.
Many people draw parallels between living in space and living in Antarctica, given the continent’s remote, austere, and potentially deadly environment. But sexual harassment and assault are pervasive in Antarctic research bases, and at scientific fieldwork sites across the world. Space research conducted on Earth isn’t free from this kind of abuse, either: a Canadian researcher withdrew from an analog astronaut mission in 2000 due to sexual harassment she suffered from a fellow participant in a Russian isolation experiment, and more recently, a number of sexual harassment complaints have been made against commercial space companies.
Space shares many characteristics as an environment with scientific fieldwork sites on Earth: It’s isolated, far from help or supervision. Competition for participants is fierce, which can suppress reporting of abuse. And the demographics of space travelers is still heavily male-dominated.
So in between giggling over steamy astronaut tabloids and speculating on the effects of microgravity on conception, let’s make sure we’re having early and continuing conversations about how to protect the bodily autonomy of space travelers and encourage a culture of consent both on and off our planet.
Other News
My upcoming book, Off-Earth: Ethical Questions and Quandaries for Living in Outer Space— which includes an entire chapter on reproductive ethics and space settlement!— has been entered in a Goodreads giveaway. This means that between now and March 5, you can enter for the chance to win one of five free copies of the book (which comes out March 7). You can enter at the Goodreads page for Off-Earth; you just need a Goodreads account!