几十年来，美国航空航天局（NASA）和其他航天机构都将太空中的性视为禁忌，毕竟没有人愿意向政府解释为什么纳税人的钱会花在这种事情上。半个世纪前，这种谨慎而自欺欺人的方法对于管理保守拘谨、童子军一般、绝大多数是男性的宇航员来说，足以够用。但如今，随着人类太空飞行的空前繁荣，越来越多的普通人也拥有摆脱地球束缚的可能性，弄清楚人们如何在太空轨道上保持健康和快乐实际上很重要——而性是这个复杂问题的基本组成部分。美国国际宇航科学研究所（International Institute for Astronautical Sciences）太空医学团队主任肖娜·潘迪亚（Shawna Pandya）说：“我认为 NASA 有个谣言流传了很长一段时间：如果他们讨论太空中的性，他们就会失明或遭受类似的事情。因为从历史上看，NASA 在很大程度上采用了迪斯尼式的处理方式。”人们必须非常非常小心，否则，他们的资金就可能会被撤掉，甚至还会波及职业生涯，因为太空中的性不被认为是优先事项，反而被认为是相当淫秽的。美国金赛研究所（Kinsey Institute）的研究心理学家西蒙·迪贝（Simon Dubé）表示：“我们谈论的是为科学和军事——两个非常保守的研究领域——所建立的项目，正如潘迪亚博士所说，这些项目是由纳税人资助的。在 1960 年代至 1990 年代之间，有研究着眼于非人类动物的繁殖，但很多研究可能没有被视为优先事项，尤其是在人类生殖方面，显然也是出于道德原因和政治原因。”如果我们想在另一颗星球定居，或者建立生活或事业，甚至在不同星球间旅行，成为太空文明生物，我们显然须要处理繁殖问题，也须要处理性的问题，这包括坠入爱河，也包括地球之外人类性生活的挑战和复杂性。目前，研究人员的主要关注点来自生物学，包括微生物学、分子生物学等等，研究的则是重力和辐射（或低引力和极端辐射）对生殖功能、生殖细胞、组织和器官的影响。但太空中已经有“恋人”了，还被录了下来：在 1994 年的“哥伦比亚”号（Columbia）航天飞机上，研究人员录下了一段日本青鳉鱼的交配过程。梳理已有的数据时，潘迪亚发现很多结论是相互矛盾的：在某些情况下，重力暴露会干扰神经发育，在哺乳动物中也观察到了发育方面的挑战；但在某些情况下，这又是暂时的。这些数据有多可靠？是否适用于高等哺乳动物？这些都仍有待探索。研究人员须要摸索出一个“重力处方”，例如在哪些过程中、多长时间内施以多大的重力，才能成功地让胎儿发育、分娩和正常生长。如果我们真的想成为多行星物种，我们就得知道这一点。我们必须面对这样一个事实，当我们移民太空时，发育异常和各种问题可能会影响高等哺乳动物。但我们也须要思考妇科、生殖健康、人口多样性、生孩子、抚养孩子、性权利、社会正义、人类的性行为和反应，而目前关于性行为和反应的数据为零。在太空中进行性行为，可能须要我们更多地考虑牛顿第三定律。每个动作都对应着大小相等、方向相反的反作用，你得弄清楚两人保持纠缠在一起的机制。已故美国作家、演员兼发明家万那·邦塔（Vanna Bonta）提出了著名的“2suit”，有点像适用于两个人的懒人毛毯衣，她在零重力下进行过测试。德国宇航员乌尔里希·瓦尔特（Ulrich Walter）在 1980 年代研究了整个太空性学话题，认为人类可以直接借鉴灰鲸的做法：当两只灰鲸试图交配时，第三只灰鲸会过来“帮忙”，用身体顶住雌性的背部，将其固定在适当的位置，以便两只灰鲸可以成功交配。关于太空性学的研究非常有限，而且显得不那么严肃，迪贝提到：“讨论这些会让人发笑，但也意味着人们对相关讨论持开放态度。为了人类的未来和那些即将进入太空的人的福祉，我们必须考虑这个问题。性是混乱的，是古怪的，讨论这些时我们会显得有点不成熟，但与此同时，这种现象也很有趣。”我们该何去何从？我们应该如何变革并取得进展？在某些情况下，我们似乎遇到了一些非常棘手的道德困境。潘迪亚：“我们是否应该制定一项政策以对抗政府-航天局资助任务的‘兄弟情谊’？我们能强制要求吗？如果两个人偷偷在一起，然后突然之间，女性宇航员怀孕了……[查看全文]
When Will We Finally Have Sex In Space?
Shawna Pandya: I think there must have been this rumor floating around NASA for the longest time that if they discussed sex in space, they would go blind or something like that.
Lee Billings: Today we're talking about the big bang but not in the way you probably think. We're talking about sex—specifically, sex in space. It's a topic NASA and other space agencies have treated as taboo for decades—because let's be real — nobody wants to explain to Congress why taxpayer dollars would be spent on something so titillating.
This prudish, head-in-the-sand approach worked well enough for managing the straitlaced, Boy Scout–like and overwhelmingly male astronaut crews of half a century ago. But today, with human spaceflight booming as never before and more and more everyday people signing up to someday slip Earth's surly bonds, figuring out how folks will stay healthy and happy in orbital habitats is actually kind of important—and sex is a fundamental part of that complex equation.
I'm Lee Billings, senior editor for space and physics at Scientific American, and this is Science, Quickly. Billings: Our guests today are two experts on "space sexology" (yes, that is a real thing): Simon Dubé, a research psychologist at the Kinsey Institute, and Shawna Pandya, director of the Space Medicine Group at the International Institute for Astronautical Sciences. And they're here to tell you everything you've always wanted to know about sex in space but were perhaps too afraid to ask.
Simon Dubé: Thank you for having us.Billings: We are here to talk today about sex—in space. Is sex seen as somehow verboten, or somehow forbidden, not to ever be discussed within NASA and other space agencies? And it's not like that with commercial space or what?Pandya: I think there must have been this rumor floating around NASA for the longest time that if they discussed sex in space, they would go blind or something like that—because, historically speaking, NASA very much took a Disney approach.I think that part of it was being cognizant of, we have to tread very, very carefully. Otherwise our funding might be pulled. There's stories of proposed research that was quashed, careers that were ruined, because it wasn't deemed a priority, and it was deemed to be actually quite salacious.Dubé: We're talking about programs that were built for science and from the military—two very conservative areas of research—and, as Dr. Pandya says, funded by the taxpayers. Now, there was research between the 1960s and 1990s looking at reproduction in nonhuman animals, but a lot of [this] research might not have been deemed, like, a priority, especially on the side of humans, obviously for ethical reason and political reasons as well.Eventually, if we wanna settle another world or establish ourselves and travel long distances and become spacefaring civilization, we need to deal with reproduction, obviously, but we also need to deal with sex, with falling in love, with the challenges and complexity of human eroticism beyond Earth.Pandya: And because we do it so well on Earth as well, clearly it's going to go so well in space.Dubé: Right now our main focus has been coming from biology. And when I say biology, I mean at large, like microbiology, molecular biology, whatnot—studying the effects of gravity and radiation, or lack of gravity and extreme radiation, on reproductive function, reproductive cells and tissues and organs. And we're really figuring out that, okay, we have a massive problem on our end on that front. And once we figure out the shield from radiation, help people maintain better health and also maybe some form of artificial gravity....Pandya: I'm going to let you in on a little secret that not many people know. So you may want to lean in for this, but there have been lovers in space. They've been caught on tape.Pandya: So we have caught the Japanese medaka fish on space shuttle Columbia, 1994. They mated it in space, and we have it on tape!Billings: You had me going there for a second. I thought you were going to talk about the infamous space shuttle astronauts who got secretly married before their joint mission and then NASA got all hush hush about what happened and, you know, red in the face.Pandya: Mark Lee and Jan Davis, yes; shuttle era. I think I would be hearing from lawyers if I put forth that rumor that it was humans. No, to be clear, it was Japanese medaka fish. However, there is video footage of that.The bottom line when we look at all of the history of studies from zebra fish to salamanders to quail eggs to mice to rats to wasps, uh, the one-line summary is that the data is conflicting at best, and further studies are needed—because in some cases, gravitational exposure causes, interferes with neurodevelopment, and we observe challenges with development even in mammals, in mice and rats. However, in other cases, that is transient. In certain cases, there is a higher rate of offspring death, so we saw that in one of the Biosatellite experiments when wasps were flown to space.How robust is this data? And then how does that apply to higher-order mammals? So that's the big question mark. And, um, to quote Dr. [Jim] Logan, who really was a proponent and, you know, um, an early explorer in this field, like, we need to know the gravity prescription, what amount of gravity for what duration and at what exposure in development is enough, to successfully be able to, um, develop, to gestate, to give birth and to have a normal, viable development as a human being.We don't know that, and we need to find that out—if we are serious about becoming this permanent, off-world, multiplanetary species.Dubé: Yes, we have to deal with the fact that developmental anomalies and all kinds of problems could affect higher-order mammals and, like, us as we move into space. But we also need to think, okay, gynecology, reproductive health, population diversity, having children, raising children, evolution, sexual rights, sexual rights, including pleasure and intersectionality, social justice issue, our sexual responses and behavior. We have limited to zero data about sexual behavior and responses. People focus on the question "Oh, can, can people have sex in space?" Probably. "Can they have sex in space safely and ethically and keep their environment viable?" That's the actual question when we think about the practical component.And when we think about the complexity of human eroticism, it's not whether people are going to be able to masturbate or have sex with a partner in space. It's what happens the next morning. What happened the next morning to the individual, to the couples, to the crew, to the mission?Pandya: How awkward is it for the rest of the crew who was kept up all night?Billings: I want to go ahead and betray my biases.Like, I feel like we've managed here on Earth to perform sex acts just fine since time immemorial. I'm very confident—and, as I guess, you are, too—that, that we will rise to the challenge of having sex in space, the physical act, even though there are all kinds of limitations and quirks. I think we're going to figure that out really well.Pandya: Let's imagine a graphic of two people intimately entwined, one person straddling the other; the other one's velcroed down.So we need to think about Newton's third law of physics. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, including thrust, right? You need to figure out the mechanics of how you're going to stay entwined in order to, to be able to actually, successfully, copulate. There's people who thought about that.[The late] Vanna Bonta, an actress and an inventor, she has famously proposed the 2suit, and it's like a snuggie for two people, but they get to bind together. She's tested in zero g. So that's one option. One of my favorite suggestions is from a German astronaut, Ulrich [Walter], who, during the 1980s..., he'd kind of looked at this, this whole topic and said, Well, why don't we just borrow ideas from the animal kingdom? Dolphins, they're kind of in a neutral buoyancy environment. So when two dolphins are trying to mate, a third dolphin comes in, takes one for the team and holds a partner in place so that the two dolphins can successfully mate.So then his suggestion is: Why doesn't an astronaut take one for the team so they can all do it dolphin-style in the name of the greater good, so we can copulate in space. So there you go. A very brief history of what has been studied for intercourse in space.Billings: Some of this stuff almost has a giggle factor associated with it, right? Imagining these things, even though physics dictates you need to have some sort of creative solution, whether that's going to be strapping yourself in with a new creative use of the CPR machine on the ISS or or whether it's going to be a two-person spacesuit, a big, sweaty snuggie. The so-called giggle factor here where people will just kind of close their minds up because it's so alien and seemingly absurd and therefore not to be taken seriously.Dubé: I don't actually try to stop it at all. When it's a little giggle, usually it means there's actually, in my experience, openness to the discussion.Then I try to move rapidly to explaining, look, I know it's funny, but we have to think about it for the future of humanity and for the well-being of those who are going into space very rapidly. So usually that little giggle is some residue of our, sex is messy, sex is quirky, we're kind of immature about it. But at the same time, it's fun. Let's not shy away from that little giggle.Billings: Where are we going to go from here? How are we going to enact changes and make progress? It seems like we run into some very tough ethical quandaries in some situations.Pandya: There's so much to unpack here. Should we have a policy against fraternization for government-space-agency-funded missions? Can we mandate that? If two people sneak off and pair off, and then all of a sudden, one, the female astronaut ends up pregnant...[full transcript]
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