No, this isn’t one of those bait-and-switch titles. It really is about sex in space. Via Deepen the Mystery, a Guardian story on the hazards of sexual encounters on long-duration space missions.
They should be out-of-this-world experiences. But US experts have warned that sex in space will bring problems not pleasure for men and women heading to the moon and Mars.
A panel of scientists has told Nasa interplanetary passion could cause chaos to its latest plans to send humans on long missions.
Cramped in spaceships for years, surrounded by the starry void, astronauts thoughts are bound to turn to romance, states the report, ‘Bioastronautics Roadmap: a risk reduction strategy for human exploration of space’.
The resulting close encounters could have profound consequences, it adds. Without supplies of the necessary precautions, zero-gravity romps could lead to zero-gravity pregnancies.
Snickering aside, I’m sure it’s a real problem — send a bunch of people into isolation in close quarters for a period of years, and something will happen.
Now, I know that certain of my co-bloggers are reliable readers of the Guardian science section, but apparently they were going to keep this story to themselves. The extra value-added you get from Cosmic Variance, of course, is that we will actually link directly to the NASA Bioastronautics Roadmap from which the story derives. Although, as it turns out, a cursory inspection didn’t turn up anything nearly as off-color as you’d find in a novel by a recently indicted former high-ranking White House staffer. But this bit was interesting:
Serious interpersonal conflicts have occurred in space flight. The failure of flight crews to cooperate and work effectively with each other or with flight controllers has been a periodic problem in both US and Russian space flight programs. Interpersonal distrust, dislike, misunderstanding and poor communication have led to potentially dangerous situations, such as crewmembers refusing to speak to one another during critical operations, or withdrawing from voice communications with ground controllers. Such problems of group cohesiveness have a high likelihood of occurrence in prolonged space flight and if not mitigated through prevention or intervention, they will pose grave risks to the mission. Lack of adequate personnel selection, team assembly, or training has been found to have deleterious effects on work performance in organizational research studies. The duration and distance of a Mars mission significantly increases this risk. The distance also reduces countermeasure options and increases the need for autonomous behavioral health support systems.
Oh, great. I see a Stranger in a Strange Land scenario on our horizon.
Then why risk people and their emotional problems in space? It may be un-heroic and un-macho, but I think sending machines such as the wonderful Mars Rovers and the brave Cassini/Huygens to explore space and the planets makes much more sense, and you get more exploration for less expense and risk. A machine can go where vulnerable humans can’t, and you don’t have to entertain it in-flight.
Ever read “The Sparrow”? Basic premise is that after a civilization is discovered, the Jesuits are the first to make the decision that the trip has to be made. One wonders if a long-trip crew should be selected from a long-standing group that already has built-in reconciliation mechanisms.
I agree with Pyracantha. It’s idiotic to think about sending people on long space voyages, especially to places like Mars where robots can do very good science, as we’ve seen. Obviously, humans have more PR value, but they also have much more sophisticated and expensive maintenance needs, not least of which is their emotional health during a long, claustrophic, exceedingly dangerous space mission. It’s a no-brainer that if you coop people up in those conditions, they’re going to have inter-personal issues — not to mention possible psychoses.
And I’d pick Quakers or Buddhists over Jesuits any day.
Its obvious that machines are a better scientific choice for long space missions but without the political $$$ to get the missions funded it becomes moot. The idea of human space travel is visceral and more likely to receive popular and therefore political support.
So here is a question to ponder any predictions on when the first human offspring to be concieved in space will be born?
I’m no biologist, but would pregnancy even work in space? Isn’t it true that prolonged space trips tended to erode bones in astro/cosmonauts? Would a fetus be able to grow a well-formed skeleton?
Extended isolation of dense populations with volumetric confinement in a military setting is in hand – the Navy. For submariners, individual males ship out but couples return six months later. The British Navy was all rum, sodomy, and the lash. Contemporary integrated gender ships have astounding pregnancy rates (and synchronized menstruation).
Mars passengers would be fried by radiation (International Space Station Freedom FUBAR Space Hole One, less 91 cm of lead shielding atmospheric equivalent but still inside the magnetosphere). Folks breathing for a year in hermetic isolation require an awful lot of stowage no matter how you engineer it, ditto accumulating solid waste re the New Orleans Superdome recently.
Will NASA do laundry other than edible wearables?
NR-1 is the smallest class of nuclear submarine, massing 400 tonnes fully loaded with a crew of 12. One imagines a cheap spacefaring retrofit swapping ocean thingies for stowage… the heads are already pressurized and valved… but NASA has no heavy lifter. Eight Space Scuttle solid fuel boosters ringing a Saturn MLV-V-3 booster would loft about 700 tonnes (reduce dead weight with aluminum-scandium alloy skin). Launch a few from the planarized summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro and hope the surgically sterilized crew doesn’t embrace a ditzy religion en route.
BGS: Conceived vs. full developed are separate issues. (no pun intended) The baby could be conceived in space then develop back on earth.
Elliot
I don’t get it — the pregnancy issue aside, why is sex in space a problem? News flash: sex acts a mediator. People who are having sex have an extra psychological motivator pushing them to work things out. It’s when there’s no sex at all that the real problems start to happen…
As for robots: yeah, sure. But have you heard how crabs in a bucket can never escape? Because everytime one of them looks like it’s about to make a break for freedom, the other crabs will gang up on it and pull the rogue crab back into the bucket? Everytime I hear that story, I have this weird vision, in which the bucket is an allegory for the Earth and the crabs represent mankind…
AND THEN A METEOR HITS THE BUCKET AND ALL OF THE CRABS DIE.
So yeah. Sex in space!
Let’s just hope the robots don’t start cavorting with each other.
Sean said:
Whoa! Check out that link, people!
Which Stranger in a Strange Land scenario did you have in mind — the computer picking the perfectly compatible crew of married couples, the perfectly compatible crew descending into adultery and murder, or the all-male crew that gets the job done?
Adultery and murder, of course. The all-male crew is not going to solve any problems.
Yeah. Actually, my interpretation of the novel was that even for Heinlein the issue wasn’t men and women so much as depending on “compatibility” vs. a disciplined military command structure. Of course, we don’t have to agree with him about how well that works.
If you want to see an hilarious depiction of the breakdown in communications on a long space voyage, rent the movie “Dark Star.” An all male crew, no sex, a communal descent in pathological depression, a dead mission leader who feels neglected, an alien beachball, and a very large bomb that thinks it’s God.
If Einstein’s theory is correct and time is relative, how long would a 9 month pregnancy take during prolonged space travel…less than, more than, less but seem like more, more but seem like less?
Italo, the pregnancy takes place in the person’s own frame of reference, (their “rest frame” is the term) and so it will take the same about of time. 9 months.
It would, however, seem to take a bit longer from the point of view of the grand-parents-to-be back on earth, especially if the ship was moving at significantly high velocity….
cheers,
-cvj