In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream

Eugene Volokh titillates us with this article about sex in space:

Douglas Powell, a psychology professor at Harvard University who was recruited in 1999 by Nasa to investigate the behavioural needs of long-term space trips, said: "Like anywhere, these are normal healthy people in their prime and they are sexually active so they are going to get involved with each other. So what's going to happen in space? It's a serious question and it needs to be confronted."

Unusually for a space issue, it is one where physical problems would not arise, as the presence or absence of gravity doesn't affect body mechanics.

But scientists such as Professor Powell are concerned that the emotional fallout from having a crew where some are happier than others, or where relationships are made and then fall apart, could be disastrous. He noted the comments of one Russian cosmonaut about time spent cooped up in the Mir space station that "when you have two people locked up in a very small environment for months at a time, all the conditions for murder are met." Mix in sex, and you almost have the script of Othello in space.

[...]

[T]here were allegations that Russia claimed a space first in 1982 when Svetlana Savitskaya shared the Salyut 7 space station with two Russian male colleagues. Online postings say there were "experiments" to try to conceive the first space child. But there is no independent confirmation of this; instead Savitskaya, who was the second woman in space, and the first to carry out a space walk, says in her memoirs that the two male cosmonauts "welcomed me at the hatch with an apron". She threw it aside and "established a working relationship."

ALTERNATIVE POST TITLE: The Zero G-Spot