Hasn’t NASA already joined the crowd by adopting its own abstinence-only educational program?
Dr. Rachel Armstrong, speaking yesterday at a British Interplanetary Society symposium on the Human Future and Space, said the US space agency Nasa was considering how to deal with the natural urges of astronauts travelling on long journeys such as a three-year trip to Mars, where the six-strong crew would be likely to include two women.
“Nasa is talking about the chemical sterilisation of astronauts on longer journeys,” Dr Armstrong said, in a talk discussing the problems humanity may face in trying to reach the planets and, eventually, the stars.
Nasa was nonplussed by the suggestion yesterday. “I haven’t heard anything about that,” said a spokesman at Nasa’s Johnson Space Centre, where the long-range trips announced by President George Bush in January are being planned.
But that denial may hide a reluctance, in a nation where the showing of a nipple on national television provokes a religious outcry, to discuss the rather delicate subject of sex in space.