Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void

by Mary Roach

  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.

  Milton added that he didn’t care for Bergman. “He won a lot of awards, but nobody was looking at his movies. He’s just depressing. There’s no joy.”

  I mentioned Fanny and Alexander.

  “Okay, that’s probably the only one that you could watch the whole movie. The rest are terrible.”

  I have to admit that I felt more joy while watching The Uranus Experiment 1 than I did watching The Seventh Seal. The film opens with a cosmonaut sitting naked on an examining table at the Russian space agency. A white adhesive EKG electrode is stuck to his chest like a nicotine patch. It is an odd touch, given that he’s there to deliver a semen sample. In the next room, jowly Russian space agency men discuss a top-secret experiment “to find out how zero G affects the sperm production.” Cut to a blonde in a snug white lab coat, a test tube dangling from her manicured fingertips. “Hello,” she says. “What a beautiful organ you have there.”

  I fast-forwarded through this scene and the one at NASA (here pronounced Nassau) headquarters, wherein we learn how the agency chooses its female interns. (An aerospace degree appears unnecessary.) I stopped fast-forwarding at the point where the action moves to zero gravity. Two orbiting space shuttles, one Russian and one American, have commenced a belly-to-belly docking maneuver. Even the spacecraft are having sex.

  The hatch between the two craft is barely opened and the two crews have their flight suits off. Silvia Saint is holding vertical, bobbing up and down as though taking a dip in a mild chop. Hang on. Hold the phone. Her ponytail is hanging down her back, and other things are hanging down her front. Without gravity, there should be no hangy-downy. This wasn’t shot in zero G! The actors’ lower legs are hidden behind a console; they’re just rising up and down on their toes and waving th
eir arms in the air.

  A press release for the trilogy, I note, makes reference to just a single shot “in total weightlessness,” and it’s in The Uranus Experiment 3. I get up off the couch to eject No. 2, but I can’t just now. An astronaut orgy, led by a Commander Wilson, has gone live on the giant wall screen at Mission Control. It’s being broadcast around the world. Scandal and chaos! NASA is shut down. The American president is on the phone. His suit is too big for him and he’s working from a cheap motel room. “This is the work of the KGB! I can smell it.”

  Commander Wilson and Silvia Saint continue to flaunt the NASA Crew Code of Conduct in installment 3. Perhaps it’s my imagination, but Commander Wilson appears better endowed than he did in 1 and 2. Could this be the effects of weightlessness? Without gravity pulling the blood down into the lower half of the body, more of it remains in the upper half. Breasts are larger, and anecdotal information suggests penises enjoy the same plumping effect. “I had an erection so intense it was painful,” writes astronaut Mike Mullane in Riding Rockets. “I could have drilled through kryptonite.”

  “I have heard others say exactly the opposite,” astronaut Roger Crouch told me, craftily leaving his own drill bit out of it. I called upon NASA physiologist John Charles to referee. Charles said that according to Buzz Aldrin, the Mercury and Gemini astronauts reported a definite lack of activity in that region. “They were going to give an award to the first man who demonstrated a response. Though how to prove it?” Charles mused. He sided with Aldrin and Crouch. And John Charles has medical science on his side. The dividing line between the part of the body that gets more fluid in zero gravity and the part that gets less is right around the diaphragm. It’s called the hydrostatic indifference point. “The male jumblies are below that point,” says Charles, “and so would seem to be drained, not engorged.”

  This could have posed a challenge for The Uranus Experiment’s male cast. But it didn’t, because guess what. Nothing was shot in zero gravity. The cameraman simply filmed the ejaculating commander on his back and then flipped the image upside down so he appears to be floating. I happen to know what a “cum shot in total weightlessness” would look like. I know because I’ve read the 1972 NASA study “Some Flow Properties of Foods in Null Gravity,” and those foods included butterscotch pudding and potato soup. The paper includes the dietician’s rendition of the zero-gravity cum shot: a demonstration of how a stream of milk “rapidly forms a perfect sphere.” Commander Wilson’s butterscotch pudding does not do this.

  A fond but accusatory email to Berth Milton earned no reply.

  THOUGH A BIOASTRONAUTICS researcher is unlikely to use a hand job to extract a sperm sample—or to preface it with the line “Hello, what a beautiful organ you have there”—the notion of a space agency studying the effects of weightlessness on sperm is a sound one. If the point of manned space exploration is to prepare us for ever-longer missions off Earth, then space agencies will need to fund research on the effects of zero gravity on human reproduction—not intercourse, but its consequences. One legitimate reason for space agencies to be uncomfortable with astronaut sex is that no one knows what biological perils await an embryo conceived in space. Beyond the protection of Earth’s atmosphere, cosmic and solar radiation levels rise significantly. Dividing cells are extremely sensitive to irradiation, thus the risk of mutations and miscarriages rises too.

  Radiation is a concern even before cells start dividing. There have been official discussions at NASA about whether female astronauts should consider cryopreserving eggs before long flights. One paper suggested lining male astronauts’ flight pants with “organ-shielding…for the testes.” (John Charles says NASA has not embraced the “extraterrestrial codpiece,” or not yet anyway.) Studies of the victims of radioactive fallout from atomic bombs in Japan during World War II suggest that short trips into space shouldn’t cause infertility. Astronauts returning from six-month missions don’t appear to have had difficulties conceiving back on Earth. But radiation risks are cumulative. The longer you’re out there, the greater the dangers. That’s why astronauts selected for a two-to-three-year Mars mission would likely be, as John Charles puts it, older folks. “They’ve already had their kids, and they’ll be dead naturally before they really develop a whole lot of cancer.”

  Is mammalian conception even possible in zero gravity? Not known. In 1988, bull sperm rode a European Space Agency rocket into orbit to see how weightlessness affected their motility. The sperm moved faster and more easily in zero gravity, which seemed to suggest that weightlessness might enhance fertility. Then along came Joseph Tash and his sea urchin splooge. Tash discovered that one of the enzymes that affects sperm motility—the one that tells them to stop wriggling their tails—was activated unusually slowly. In and of itself, not a big deal. But if weightlessness delayed one enzyme’s activation, Tash cautioned, it might delay others—including, say, the enzyme that readies the sperm to deposit their DNA packets. Eggs could be tripped up, as well. British sexologist Roy Levin has speculated that, without gravity, it could be difficult or impossible for the ovum to enter and make its way along the fallopian tube.

  Why not send some rats into orbit and see what happens? The Soviet space agency did. In 1979, a group of rats was launched in an unmanned biosatellite. After launch, a compartment separator automatically pulled out, allowing male rats to do the opposite. None of the females came back to earth pregnant, though there were signs that conception had taken place. “What the study suggests is that certain early phases go awry,” says April Ronca, an obstetrician/gynecologist who studied mammalian pregnancy and birth in zero gravity at NASA Ames before leaving to take a post at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. “Maybe the placenta can’t form. Maybe the uterus can’t have proper implantation. Any step along the way could be compromised by zero gravity in ways that we haven’t foreseen. We know nothing.”

  Setting aside the radiation dangers, a zero-gravity pregnancy would seem, simply on an intuitive level, to be less problematic. Given that pregnant women are sometimes confined to bed rest—a popular zero-gravity analog, as we’ve seen—and that fetuses float in fluid (another zero-gravity analog), weightlessness would not, on the face of it, appear to pose a threat to the developing fetus. Ronca sent pregnant rats into space* for the final two weeks of gestation. Two days after landing, the females gave birth. (NASA stopped short of allowing birth in space, largely because of logistics. Someone would have had to build a birthing support for the females, and a nursing structure to keep the babies from floating away from the teat.) Other than some mild vestibular issues, the babies were essentially normal.

  What wasn’t normal was the birth itself—even though the rats had come down from space by then. Rats who’d spent two weeks in space had fewer, and weaker, uterine contractions. In Ronca’s view, this is a dangerous difference. Contractions play an important role in a newborn’s adjustment to life outside the womb. The compressions of vaginal birth cause a huge release of stress hormones in the fetus; these are the same fight-or-flight hormones that fuel feats of extreme strength in adults. “This hormonal surge appears to be very important for getting physiological systems moving. All of a sudden a newborn has to breathe on its own, it has to figure out how to suckle from a nipple. If there aren’t enough contractions, the hormone release is smaller and the fetus has a harder time.” Studies have shown that infants born via planned C-section, with no contractions—as compared to those delivered vaginally—have a higher risk of respiratory distress and high blood pressure, a harder time expelling lung fluids, and delayed neurodevelopment. In other words, stressing an infant appears to be part of nature’s plan. (For this reason, Ronca is also not an advocate of water births.)

  It surprised me that in thirty-plus years of orbiting science labs, so little work has been done. Is it institutional conservatism? Male squeamishness over obstetrical issues? Ronca thought it was more a case of priority than prudery. “We don’t know much about the effects of weightlessness
on any of the body’s basic systems—bone, muscle, cardiovascular. We know even less about the brain. Reproduction just has not been high on the list.”

  And now the funding is gone. NASA’s life sciences program has been pretty well gutted. I almost wrote “is dead in the water,” then caught myself. The last significant NASA mammalian biology study flew aboard Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003. The rats perished along with the crew. There was nothing anyone could do to save them, though the same cannot necessarily be said for the astronauts.

  WITHERING HEIGHTS

  Bailing Out from Space

  The Perris SkyVenture vertical wind tunnel is a hurricane in a can. Air rushes at 100-plus miles per hour through the core of a cylindrical building that resembles an air-traffic control tower. It’s probably not the tallest building in Perris—a sprawl of malls and tract homes a couple hours out from Los Angeles—but it feels like it. Up near the top, where the controllers would be sitting, a set of doors open onto the column of wind. Customers lean into the air, open their arms and legs as they fall, and are lifted off their feet. It’s the sensation of free fall with no danger or rush: skydiving with its balls removed. If it is your first visit, a staff person helps steady you in case you drift upward and panic and bounce off the walls like an air-popped kernel.

  Today is Felix Baumgartner’s first visit to SkyVenture, but no one is holding on to him. Baumgartner, a photogenic forty-one-year-old Austrian, is a high-profile skydiver and BASE* jumper. You can go on YouTube and watch Baumgartner jump off the outstretched right arm of the enormous Christ statue in Rio de Janeiro or, more prosaically, the roof of the Warsaw Marriott. For most of his jumps he wears a skydiver’s jumpsuit. In the Marriott video, he’s dressed in business casual. He’s done this to pass through the lobby without arousing suspicion, but the impression it gives, as you watch him walk to the edge of the roof in his tie and dress shirt, is that jumping off buildings is just another day on the job for Felix Baumgartner.