Posted 10/23/2005 05:22:00 PM by Douglas

Is coitus going to play a significant part in the future of long-duration space flight? I think most astronauts know they don't have to go to orbit to get some Tang.

Sex and romantic entanglements among astronauts could derail missions to Mars and should therefore be studied by NASA, warns a top-level panel of US researchers.

NASA plans to return astronauts to the Moon by 2018 and later on to Mars. But a round-trip mission to the Red Planet would probably last at least 30 months and carry six to eight people. That would be a hotbed for intense crew relationships, says a report by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS).

This is nothing that the navies of the world haven't been dealing with for centuries. I don't think it's any more of an issue with people joining the 250,000 mile high club than in our modern Navy. But what can NASA do about it?

"One could perhaps select for people who seem to have less need for sex, or at least don't use sex as a form of self-validation," Ellison says.

Considering that most astronauts are engineers, that shouldn't be too much of a problem.

Beyond that, she adds, NASA should consider the practical issues of out-of-this world sex. "How do you have sex in weightlessness?" she ask. "And there's a lack of privacy – often they're monitoring pulse rate and temperature. I don't know how that would be handled."

NASA doesn't like to acknowledge it, but they've already flown a married couple in space on STS-47. I believe they've since divorced, as their NASA biographies make no mention to their marriage.