APn 09/05 1047 Sex in Space By Marcia Dunn, AP Aerospace Writer CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- Someday, men and women will boldly do what no one has done before. But not this month. This month, married astronauts Mark Lee and Jan Davis will fly together as crew members on the space shuttle Endeavour. But that's it. Nothing else. Sex in space will remain the last frontier, for the moment. But just for the moment. Birds do it, bees do it, and inevitably astronauts will do it. "The actual act of sex is really going to be quite remarkable," said Dr. Patricia Santy, a former NASA flight surgeon who now is a psychiatrist at the University of Texas in Galveston. "Human beings are infinitely adaptable. If they can do it in the back of a '57 Chevy, they can do it anywhere." "Can sex happen in space? Can human beings copulate in space?" asked Lynn Wiley, a developmental biologist at the University of California at Davis. "We really don't have any physiological evidence that we won't." Wiley, a member of a NASA science advisory committee, is more interested in the morning after and the morning after that. "Can men make good sperm in space and women make good eggs, and can that grow into a little baby? What happens when birth happens? We have no clue," Wiley said. "If it (birth) happens normally, what happens to the developing child? Will his muscles be strong enough to walk on Earth? We don't know." And then there are the even longer-range questions such as radiation-caused mutations, sterilization and the impact on succeeding generations. But none of these questions will be answered this month. "A seven-day shuttle mission is not going to tell us anything at all about human physiology and reproduction in space," Santy said. Besides, nothing is going to happen on this shuttle mission. Really. That anyone is raising the possibility in the first place is the result of an unusual circumstance. Lee and Davis fell in love and got married while training for Endeavour's upcoming Spacelab mission, set to begin Sept. 12. Because they were so far along in their training, NASA reluctantly made an exception to its policy barring married couples from flying together. Lee and Davis will be the first married couple to fly together in space. But the romance ends there -- they will work opposite 12-hour shifts during the seven-day mission and share the cramped shuttle with five other astronauts. Forget about privacy. "You have cameras all over, people talking to you," said astronaut Bonnie Dunbar, herself the wife of astronaut Ronald Sega. "You hope you can go into the waste management system (toilet) and close the curtains for maybe about 10 minutes of privacy." Nonetheless, rumors of out-of-this-world sex have circulated ever since space crews went coed. But they're just that -- rumors. "I don't think we'll ever know, and I'm not sure we should," Santy said. But of course, inquiring minds DO want to know. And scientific minds are interested, too, though their curiosity is focused at the moment on other species. Only one study of animal mating in space has been reported to date. In 1979, the Russians sent up five female and two male rats that spent 19 days in space. There were no births after the animals returned to Earth. There wasn't any evidence, in fact, that any of the animals had mated. Wiley and other American researchers plan to send male and female mice on a shuttle in 1994 to see whether they mate and the females become pregnant. It's not as simple it sounds. The female mice will have to receive hormones "so they're in the mood" -- otherwise, they will have nothing to do with the males, Wiley said. The males will have to be separated so they don't fight. The enclosure will have to provide regulated periods of light and darkness, and accommodate videotaping. The cost of this little tryst? $2 million. Researchers are forgoing the preliminaries for a frog reproductive experiment planned during Endeavour's upcoming flight. Four South African clawed frogs, all females, will be injected with hormones in orbit to induce ovulation. Their eggs will be saturated with sperm; three days later, the eggs should hatch into tadpoles. It would be the first time a creature other than an insect has been fertilized and reproduced in space, said Ken Souza, chief of the space life sciences payloads office at NASA's Ames Research Center. "We're not trying to solve the problem of human presence in space," Souza said. "We want to answer a question that has been around for over a century: Does gravity play a role in normal amphibian development?" This is not racy stuff -- not like the question of contraception in space. Space pregnancies would cause work disruptions, and no one knows how a fetus and child would develop in space. So contraception must be a top priority in planning trips to Mars and moon colonies, Wiley said. What kind of contraception that will be, though, no one knows. "Every mechanical way we know has a failure rate," Wiley said. "Really, the only perfect ways we know are ways just impossible to ask a person to do. You can't demand sterilization." Nor can you expect celibacy. "Someone once asked me at a meeting, `Do you expect people on Mars to be celibate or have sex?"' Wiley said. "I looked at this guy and I said, `If you think two men and two women are going to go out to Mars in a coffee can and live for 18 months or two years and not have sex, you're nuts."' Santy fears Mars crews may be limited to men because of the sex issue. Women certainly are in the minority among space travelers: 191 of the 214 people chosen by NASA as astronauts since Group No. 1 in 1959 have been men. Former Apollo astronaut Michael Collins contends married couples might make the best Mars crew members. "An element of stability, of old-shoe comfort, would be introduced by having one husband or wife to fall back on," Collins wrote in his 1990 book "Mission to Mars." "Certainly a singles-bar atmosphere, a charged mixture of sexually unattached competitors, would be a disaster." Counters Santy: "Married couples fight and married individuals have sex with other people." Regardless, NASA needs to start making appropriate plans for space station Freedom, to be built in orbit later this decade, Santy said. The agency hopes to have four astronauts living full time on the station by the end of the decade; six-month stints are planned. At least on the station, a pregnant astronaut could be returned to Earth on the first ship back. There would be no turning back on a trip to Mars. "We've got a golden opportunity in the next 20 years before we go to Mars to collect preliminary data -- psychological and physiological," Santy said. She warned that to do otherwise would be folly. "Wherever people go, sex will follow," she said. ------ Copyright, 1992. The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in this news report may not be republished or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.