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Junkie
Moderator Emeritus
Location: Chicago
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Sex in Space Forbidden, Says Russian Cosmonaut
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By Interfax
posted: 09:36 am ET
01 June 2001
MOSCOW, June 1 (Interfax) -- Cosmonauts claim that it is forbidden to have sex in space.
"A lot of different commissions -- moral, ethical and medical ones -- that were discussing this, finally ruled that one must not do it so far, because the consequences are unknown for those who would be born," Cosmonaut Talgat Musabayev said in an interview published in the Friday edition of Rossiiskaya Gazeta.
Musabayev also gave a negative answer when asked whether anybody has ever had sex in space. "Definitely not, although there is a lot of idle talk around this," he said.
"We laugh, because we just have no opportunity for this, and the Americans are a very disciplined people," he said.
Touching on other issues, he compared the wages of Russian and foreign astronauts. Musabayev noted that during his second mission, he was the captain, while a flight engineer was a foreigner. "He was paid 31 times more than I, his commander," he noted.
Russian cosmonauts are paid so-called "flight allowances" -- $300 per day, which is taxed. In addition, there are different wage rates for spacewalks, which depend on the time of working outside the spacecraft. There are also different coefficients -- for instance, performing a manual docking earns twice as much pay as supervising an automatic one, Musabayev said.
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Sex That's Out of This World
Quote:
by Michelle Delio Michelle Delio
02:00 AM Nov, 04, 2000 EST
Reader's advisory: Wired News has been unable to confirm some sources for a number of stories written by this author. If you have any information about sources cited in this article, please send an e-mail to sourceinfo[AT]wired.com.
Getting amorous while in orbit is a fantasy for some, and a serious question for those with a scientific thirst to know if having sex in zero-gravity conditions would be fabulous or fraught with technical difficulties.
Both desires are fed in the upcoming issue of Quest: The History of Spaceflight Quarterly, which features an article that explores the history of sex in the United States and Russian space programs.
It contains tasty tidbits about past plans to film a sex documentary on board the Mir Space Station, allegations of adultery by two Russian cosmonauts and specifics of the pornographic videos that were viewed during space missions.
To write "The Psychological and Social Effects of Isolation on Earth and in Space," Peter Pesavento interviewed scientists, psychologists, astronauts and cosmonauts for an in-depth and personal piece which lays bare the mysteries of how humans handle themselves –- and, sometimes, others -– during extended space missions.
Acknowledging that outer-space sex is a rather racy topic for an academic journal, Quest's editor, Prof. Stephen Johnson of the University of North Dakota, said the article broke new ground in discussing the social and psychological issues of space flight from a historical and human perspective.
"Sexuality and gender relations are just one of several topics that the author addresses, all of which have been issues in human space flight in the past, and will be again in the future," Johnson said.
Pesavento focused his article on what he says is "the largest challenge of long-term space flights": the need to have people return from their missions in acceptable emotional and physical health.
In the piece, Pesavento points out the should-be-obvious fact that "if humans are sexual beings on the ground, they also will be sexual beings in space." It's a concept that NASA, publicly at least, allegedly chooses to ignore.
According to Pesavento, NASA thinks that sex is just a very small part of a more important issue: the lack of any physical connection with loved ones when astronauts are in orbit.
Quest editor Scott Sacknoff added that he believes that since sex in the United States is often a very controversial subject, NASA public relations people simply steer clear of releasing any information about what sorts of extracurricular activities might be happening up there.
"They could open up a can of worms if they had to publicize their official policies for astronaut relations," Sacknoff said.
"I personally cannot picture NASA supporting efforts to film a movie on the International Space Station where a sex scene takes place, such as that which (Pesavento's) article mentions was proposed for Mir."
Consequently there is very little information available about NASA astronauts' more amorous activities while in orbit.
In the book Living in Space, former NASA consultant G. Harry Stine, who died in 1997 shortly after his book was published, said that the neutral buoyancy tank that's used for astronaut training at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, was also used, both officially and unofficially, to see whether people could shag sans gravitational pull.
According to Stine, it was "possible but difficult." Stine also explained that the tank experiments revealed that sex in zero gravity would be easier if a helpful astronaut was available to assist the copulating couple by holding one of the two participants in place.
French astronomer Pierre Kohler, in his 1996 book The Final Mission, alleged that astronauts conducted NASA-sponsored sexual research on a space-shuttle mission in 1996.
Kohler's graphic descriptions of experiments that involved elastic belts and inflatable tubes were hotly denied by NASA and were later found to have originated with a parody piece that had been widely distributed on various Internet news groups and websites. The Final Mission is now out of print.
Pesavento said that the Russians have a more open attitude towards sex in space, noting that the Institute of Biomedical Problems, a leading Russian research institute in the field of space medicine and biology, has been involved for decades in sex-related studies of living creatures in space.
The Quest article offers other salacious snippets of information for the, uh, scientifically curious -- including astronaut Alan Bean's comment that an all-male crew is a good way to prevent jealousy, something he believes could be a problem with a mixed crew where not everyone was "participating."
"If some are doing it, you are going to want to. Hey, that fella’s got a big smile on his face, and that bugs me," Bean said.
Pesavento also laid some free-floating scraps of space sex gossip to rest, such as the widespread story that cosmonauts Valeri Vladimirovich Polyakov and Yelena Vladimirovna Kondakova were the first to explore the highly personal potentials of zero gravity together.
And, since both are married to others, they were also accused of being the first deep-space adulterers.
The story was covered in numerous newspapers, mostly in Europe, during Polyakov and Kondakova's 1995 mission. Pesavento said that Polyakov later denied that he'd had anything more than a professional relationship with Kondakova.
But evidently Polyakov believed that substitutes for the real thing are not a good idea either. He particularly eschewed the use of the sort of inflatable friends that you can purchase in an adult bookstore.
The trouble with such toys, Polyakov was quoted in Quest as saying, is that "anyone who is using such things may develop the so-called 'doll syndrome,' or in other words, may start preferring the doll (to their own spouse or loved one) even after (they return to Earth). People have a sad experience of using such things during long-lasting stays in Antarctica and sea voyages."
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I'd like to beleive that the cosmonauts defied the rules and actually did knock boots... The thought of Neil armstrong and Buzz Aldrin getting it on together disturbs me a little bit..
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