...we're NASA.

Laura Woodmansee talks about some first-hand experience of the absurd prudishness of the space agency, and much of the space community.

It isn't that it's NASA--it's that it's a government agency. One of the truisms of civil service is that porn is the only thing that will get you flat-out fired. Even gross and constant sexual harassment will only get you transferred to another project/building/location/country.

Another point: I'd imagine that these bookstores are nominally all-ages type of places, and "SEX IN SPACE" doesn't really fit that situation.

I see that Keith Cowing appears to have lifted her entire article off of The Space Review and put it on his website without attribution.

Well if we are so sensitive as to not want to "pollute" space with our nuclear power generators then were definitely not going to junk it up with our nasty, iky, and dirty people juice.

Regardless of the book, I find it hard to believe that NASA doesn't even acknowledge that s3x has ALREADY occurred in space.

The astronaut corps is one of the biggest groups of Type "A" personalities on earth. Type "A" personalities as a group are known to have very active sex appetites. Even if they are married, and even given the small size of the Shuttle, I doubt that in all the flight hours spent in space that no two adults have seen fit to do the LOE version of the Wild Monkey Dance.

On a 3 year round trip to Mars, sex is as much a need as water or air. Unless NASA is openly recruiting gay men as astronauts, the Mars explorers will need some men and women of sexual compatibility, willing to keep each other happy along the way.

Steve, our success rate for finding mutually compatible sexual partners (and keeping them from becoming hostile for 3 years) is pretty bad, even on Earth. I think we are going to have to send old fogies that have been married for 10 years already...