I hate it when I don’t have a good reason to be up at 4 A.M. This morning has been sorta productive so far though. My journey’s led me to this article on Slate about whether or not Astronauts have had sex in space. It’s kind of an interesting question, mostly because NASA won’t talk about it.

The short version is that there’s speculation about one U.S. couple and one Russian couple.

The U.S. couple flew in 1992 on STS-47. One of the arguments against anybody ever having had sex on the space shuttle is that there’s just not a whole lot of privacy on board. However, STS-47 was carrying a Spacelab module for conducting microgravity investigations in “materials and life sciences”. So, instead of having the typical two pressurized crew areas for STS-47, this particular mission had three. Newlywed couple + extra pressurized module + refusal to answer questions on the subject = your guess is as good as mine.

The Russian couple would have had more opportunities because they were together in space longer and Mir had more privacy. However, the evidence against them is summed up as, “especially after a video got out showing Valery playfully splashing water on Elena during the flight.” If this was presented in an episode of Monk, then I might think that there was something to go off of here. Since it wasn’t, I’m inclined to believe that nothing happened.