Eric Berger has the story, including the fact that we’ve done absolutely no research in partial gravity, which will be necessary if people want to procreate on Mars.
I’d note that while it’s never officially been confirmed, it seems unlikely, given the nature of astronauts, that no one has ever done it in space.
Shuttle had very sensitive accelerometers. It's likely that Houston was aware of any rhythmic orbital exertions. https://t.co/RNnYSfnCyi
— SafeNotAnOption (@SafeNotAnOption) April 21, 2016
Bringing radiation into the picture is a red herring. The subject is gravity. It seems clear gravity will have some impact but also that it isn’t absolute. In other words, not so different from life as it is now.
Life goes on.
I’d like to think the first boink in space was between Mike Mullane and Judy Resnik on STS-41D. It’s the romantic in me. Mullane is effusive in his eulogy of Resnik in his astronaut memoir Riding Rockets and pretty clearly had a thing for her. The extreme lack of privacy on a Shuttle mission with six crew would have made the mechanics and timing more challenging than any official part of the mission if the goal was also to keep things sub-rosa.
Yes, that does seem like the most likely first free-fall coupling. It’s sad, given what happened to Judy.
More than sad. A genuine tragedy in the full Greek sense of the word.
I remember being absolutely gobsmacked, as the Brits say, upon first sight of a weightless Judy in the IMAX Space Shuttle film “The Dream is Alive.” Certain women are so preposterously gorgeous that one’s initial sight of them is nearly as impactful as a physical blow. Judy was one of those. Those legs! That hair! Stupefying!
Who wrote that speculative article in Analog way back when (circa 1990) entitled (I think) “The Three Dolphin Club”–was it G. Harry Stine or Tom Logan or someone else? The author asserted that those in the know had told him that these experiments had taken place in the neutral buoyancy simulator; I can’t remember if on-orbit experiments were confirmed.