“I should probably get going. I know you’ve got…”
Leon grins. “Nothing to do?”
Mating Without Gravity
Sean Hayes was taking off his wet suit when I called. Hayes is a marine biologist who wrote his dissertation on harbor seal mating strategies. Since floating in water is a useful approximation of floating in zero gravity—useful enough that astronauts rehearse spacewalk duties in a giant pool—and since it is easier to get a seal expert (hell, a seal) to expound on weightless sex than it is to get NASA going on the topic, I turned to the marine biologists.
“They’re very discreet,”* said Hayes, of earless seals in general (as opposed to the shore-mating, circus-ball-balancing eared variety). Hayes built special equipment to spy on wild harbor seals and still never caught a glimpse of floating pinniped bliss. In its natural habitat, the spotted seal, much like the spaceman, has never been caught in the act. If you want to see how it’s done, you need to put a couple of them in a swimming pool. Hayes sent me a paper written by two Johns Hopkins researchers who did just that.
What the biologists observed confirmed what I had suspected: that when it comes to sexual intercourse, gravity is your friend. “The male spent most of his time grasping the female tightly, attempting to hold on and remain in the coital position,” the researchers wrote. He used his teeth as a third hand, biting onto the female’s back to help keep the two of them from floating apart.* A photograph shows the blubbery couple on the bottom of the pool, attempting to counteract Newton’s Third Law: To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Take away or greatly reduce the force of gravity, and thrusting just pushes the object of one’s affections away. †
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.* 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?”*
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.† 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,* “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.