Long Space Travel, Sex Compatible? Zero Gravity, Frequent Sunrises Raise Concerns

Humans have walked on the moon and orbited Earth, but to explore the billions of galaxies in the great beyond, scientists must find the answer to a burning question: How do we have sex in space?

Really.

The galaxy is 100,000 light-years across, said Jerry Brown, U.S. Space Foundation executive director for education.

“If it’s going to take 10,000 years for us to get to the next place, we need to have children in space,” Brown told about 25 Montana grade-school teachers at the University of Montana on the last day of a weeklong “space camp.”

First and foremost, it’s a problem of physics.

“For every action there is a reaction, and our bodies are like big sacks of fluid,” Brown said. “They compress and go apart. One compression and one bounce and it’s over.”

In 1985, a scientist patented a mating harness to hold two bodies together in space, but the harness has yet to be tried out, Brown said.

However, one male astronaut, whom Brown declined to name, returned from a space flight with his significant other and said about sex: “It’s very difficult, maybe it’s impossible. It’s hard to keep in one place and you keep floating off in different directions.”

Then there’s the lack of privacy.

But it’s not just about overcoming the physical hurdle of getting male and female body parts aligned, or finding a discreet time to do it, it’s also about the basic biological functioning of our reproductive system.

Brown said males have a 24-hour hormone schedule. Testosterone surges during the evening hours and peaks around 2 a.m., under the cover of darkness. But in space, the sun rises and sets every 45 minutes - 16 times in 24 hours - which throws off an astronaut’s natural rhythms.

No testosterone, no sex drive.

Female astronauts have experienced disruptions in their 28-day menstrual cycle, which in some cases completely stopped. No cycle, no babies.

Then there’s the travel patterns of sperm and egg.

Here on Earth a woman’s egg “drops” down the fallopian tube, and the male’s sperm swims “up” the vaginal canal to dock with the egg and fertilize in the uterus. When the embryo grows, it drops down towards the canal, and is pushed out, with the help of gravity, nine months later. But in space there is no up and down flow. Everything just floats, Brown said. And that plays havoc on the fluids in the body.

No one knows how amniotic fluid or blood flow through the umbilical cord would be affected, Brown said, because in zero gravity, body fluid gets pumped into the upper body, draining the legs and waist area, dramatically changing the shape of a person’s body. The result: the “fat face chicken leg syndrome.”

In fact, even if we do find a way for humans to procreate in the heavens, scientists wonder what the babies will look like.

“If we go to space will we remain the same species? If we go and stay, the children will be born in microgravity and we better figure out what that would look like,” Brown said. “They may not look human, they may not survive, and they may not be able to return to Earth.”

Because astronauts in space have lost up to 40 percent of their calcium mass, it is probable that children born (however unlikely) would be without a complete skeletal structure, which would be debilitating on Earth, but perhaps beneficial in space, Brown said.

Children would also develop in an environment without ever learning how to crawl, which is also essential for hand-eye coordination and development.

The questions may not be answered in our lifetime, but the desire and the know-how to go that far into space will be born soon, Brown said.

And the people who choose to adventure into the unknown and raise children in space will be creating a new being where space is their realm, Brown said.

“The longer we are out there, the less human we will be.”