by Mary Roach
When you fall, the top of your hip—or more specifically, the femoral neck and greater trochanter at the top of your thighbone—takes the brunt of the force in a side-smack manner. That’s not the same architecture that gets strengthened when you jog or do squats. The parts of the bone that are stressed by walking and everyday activity hold up surprisingly well with age. The body tends to redistribute bone to those areas—at the expense of other structures, including the ones you fall onto. For this reason, some osteoporosis experts feel that fall prevention is a better way to avoid broken hips than is load-bearing exercise.
I asked Tom Lang whether anyone had looked into the possibility of preventing hip fractures by simply thwacking the aged on the sides of their hips a few times a day. Not hard enough to break anything, obviously, but vigorously enough that the impact would stimulate the osteocytes to strengthen the structure. I didn’t expect him to say yes. He told me to contact Dennis Carter at Stanford University.
“It was just a concept,” said Carter when I called. “We never built it.” It didn’t thwack, it squeezed. “You’d sit in a lounge chair and have things at your sides squeezing your hips, right at the greater trochanter, where people fall and hit their hips.” It seems like a smart idea, but the companies Carter approached wouldn’t touch it. Because they thought the hips might break and the ladies would sue? “That, yes. And I think it was just too weird for them.”
Is it possible to bolster one’s hip bones by doing some type of controlled fall? Here too, I did not expect a yes. Carter told me that a graduate student at the Oregon State University Bone Research Laboratory had looked into this. As part of her thesis, Jane LaRiviere had subjects lie on one side, raise themselves up 4 inches, and then drop onto a wood floor. They did this thirty times in a row, three times a week. At the end of the trial, scans showed a statistically significant, though small, increase in bone density in the femoral neck on that side, as compared with the undropped-upon side. One of LaRiviere’s professors, Toby Hayes, felt that if the impacts had been a bit harder and the study lengthier, the results might well have been more impressive.
When you get right down to it, nothing works particularly well. Calcium’s a bust. To a certain extent, so is exercise. Bisphosphonates have come under scrutiny for giving some patients necrosis of the jawbone. “The state of the art for countermeasures right now,” John Charles allowed, “is the same as it was forty years ago.”
The astronauts don’t care. “They want to go to Mars,” says Charles. “That’s what they joined the program for.”
WHITSON IS CONFIDENT that someone will come up with a good, safe drug solution by the time a manned Mars mission becomes a reality. A more likely scenario is that genetic testing will by then play a part in astronaut selection. (There’s a large hereditary component to bone loss.) Charles envisions NASA recruiting Mars astronauts who are “almost bulletproof—people who never had a kidney stone in their lives, that come with high bone density, good cholesterol numbers, high radiation insensitivity…”
The bones of black women are 7 to 24 percent denser, on average, than those of white and Asian women. (I don’t have statistics for black men, but presumably they have sturdier bones as well.) I asked Charles whether NASA ought to consider an all-black crew for Mars. “Why not?” he said. “For decades, we had an all-blond, blue-eyed program.”
An all–black bear crew would be another way around the bone-loss conundrum. Black bears emerge from their dens after four to seven months in bed with bones as strong as when they turned in. There are researchers who believe that hibernating bears may hold the key to treating and preventing bone loss. I talked to one of them, Seth Donahue, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Michigan Technological University. Donahue said that hibernating bears’ bones do break down, just like bed-resters’ and astronauts’ bones. What’s different is that their bodies take the calcium and other breakdown minerals out of the blood and reapply it to their bones. Otherwise the calcium level in their blood would build to a lethal concentration. Because during those four to seven months, the bears don’t get up to go to the bathroom. All the bone minerals that get dumped in the bloodstream as the bones dismantle themselves would stay there, accumulating. “So they’ve evolved a method to recycle that calcium.” And therefore not die. The bone protection is “a lucky consequence.”
Donahue and others have been studying the hormones that control bear metabolism to see whether they can identify some component that will help postmenopausal women (and astronauts) grow new bone. They’ve nominated bear parathyroid hormone. Donahue has a company that makes a synthesized version, injections of which are being tested in rats and eventually, if all goes well, will be tested in postmenopausal women. Even human parathyroid hormone makes women grow bone. It’s one of the most effective ways to increase postmenopausal bone density. Unfortunately, high doses make rats grow bone cancers, and thus the Food and Drug Administration limits prescriptions to one year and for women who’ve already had fractures. Donahue said bear parathyroid hormone doesn’t appear to have any adverse side effects, so keep your claws crossed that it pans out.
There’s another reason hibernating bears are interesting to NASA. If humans could be made to hibernate, to breathe one-fourth as much oxygen and eat and drink nothing for six months of a two-to-three-year Mars mission, imagine how much less food and oxygen and water one would need to launch. (The less baggage on board a spacecraft, the cheaper it is to launch. Once it reaches the speed needed to escape the pull of Earth’s gravity and leaves behind the air drag of Earth’s atmosphere, a spacecraft basically coasts to Mars.) Each extra pound of weight launched adds thousands of dollars to the project budget. Science-fiction writers glommed onto the idea decades ago, outfitting fictional spacecraft with high-tech, climate-controlled hibernaculums.
Do space agencies ever discuss human hibernation? They have, and they do. “It never dies,” says John Charles. “It just hibernates.” Charles puts little stock in the possibility. “Even if it did work, would we really short-supply a crewed vehicle on a three-year mission to Mars? What if the hibernaculum malfunctioned, and everyone woke up? How much food and oxygen do you carry, just in case? And when is that amount sufficiently large that the savings due to hibernation are lost?”
Here’s another reason it won’t work. Hibernating bears derive all their water and energy from reserves of fat that they build up by bingeing before they den. According to the Bear Center at Washington State University, a small (astronaut-sized) bear gorging on apples and berries consumes up to 40 percent of its body weight each day during this period. That’s about 65 pounds of food a day.
Six months of living on nothing but fat—even your own—probably isn’t healthy unless your body has somehow adapted to it. Little known fact: Hibernating bears have high “bad” cholesterol levels. (They also have very high “good” cholesterol—which probably explains why heart disease is unknown in bears.)
BED-RESTERS ARE not bears. They have to eat and drink and excrete, and that last one was Tim’s undoing. At FARU, B’s are to be M’d in bed, and no place else. Using a bedpan while lying flat on one’s back is an awkward and unnatural way to “make,” as my mother-in-law Jeanne likes to say. Tim sat up, and was caught on film by the camera aimed at his roommate Aaron’s bed. (He hadn’t drawn the curtain around that side of his bed because Aaron was out of the room.) “I didn’t think it would have that much of an impact,” he told me. “But it really threw off the scientific data.”* Tim was asked to leave.
Leon had no trouble with this particular aspect of bed rest. “After the first couple times, it’s second nature. And I go…a lot. I go at least four or five times more than any subject here. By the end of three months, I’ll be at around 260….” This is one way bed-resters are different from astronauts. With bed-resters, there are no taboo interview topics.
Including sex. Earlier, Joe Neigut was showing me the shower area, a tiled room the size of a horse stall, outfitted w
ith a waterproof gurney. “So the shower,” I said, “is their only…private time, do you know what I mean?”
“Yes…” Joe replied. Then he began talking about the new shower head, which had replaced an industrial sprayer of the type used by restaurant dishwashers. I wasn’t sure he did know what I meant, so I asked Leon. Leon confirmed that the shower was “where most of them do it.” As with astronauts in orbit, masturbation is not formally addressed in the FARU rules or orientation. Leon, being Leon, asked the unit psychologist. “I mean, if it’s something that would throw off the test or something, I wouldn’t do it.” The psychologist blushed and then gave Leon the go-ahead, leaving the logistics up to him.
In a memoir, astronaut Michael Collins relates a story of a physician back in the Apollo era who recommended regular masturbation on long missions, lest astronauts develop prostate infections. The flight surgeon for Collins’s moon mission “decided to ignore that advice,” and ignoring seems to have been the basic approach to the human sex drive ever since. It’s the same way at the Russian space agency. Cosmonaut Alexandr Laveikin told me he too had heard that lengthy abstinence could cause prostate infections, but that the space agency pretends the issue doesn’t exist. “It’s up to yourself how you will deal with it. But everybody is doing it, everybody understands. It’s nothing. My friends ask me, ‘How are you making sex in space?’ I say, ‘By hand!’” As for the logistics: “There are possibilities. And sometimes it happens automatically while you sleep. It’s natural.” John Charles told me he’d heard about the link between prostate health and “self-stim”—at NASA, there’s an abbreviation for everything—but never heard any formal discussion, pro or con, of orbital masturbation.
Or two-party sex, for that matter. Here at FARU, that is covered in the rules, though indirectly. Visitors can’t sit or lie down on the beds. “My wife didn’t mind,” jokes Leon. “That was a plus of me leaving!” I had stopped in to his room again to say good-bye. He’s been showing me family photos on his computer.
“I should probably get going. I know you’ve got…”
Leon grins. “Nothing to do?”
THE THREE-DOLPHIN CLUB
Mating Without Gravity
Sean Hayes was taking off his wet suit when I called. Hayes is a marine biologist who wrote his dissertation on harbor seal mating strategies. Since floating in water is a useful approximation of floating in zero gravity—useful enough that astronauts rehearse spacewalk duties in a giant pool—and since it is easier to get a seal expert (hell, a seal) to expound on weightless sex than it is to get NASA going on the topic, I turned to the marine biologists.
“They’re very discreet,”* said Hayes, of earless seals in general (as opposed to the shore-mating, circus-ball-balancing eared variety). Hayes built special equipment to spy on wild harbor seals and still never caught a glimpse of floating pinniped bliss. In its natural habitat, the spotted seal, much like the spaceman, has never been caught in the act. If you want to see how it’s done, you need to put a couple of them in a swimming pool. Hayes sent me a paper written by two Johns Hopkins researchers who did just that.
What the biologists observed confirmed what I had suspected: that when it comes to sexual intercourse, gravity is your friend. “The male spent most of his time grasping the female tightly, attempting to hold on and remain in the coital position,” the researchers wrote. He used his teeth as a third hand, biting onto the female’s back to help keep the two of them from floating apart.* A photograph shows the blubbery couple on the bottom of the pool, attempting to counteract Newton’s Third Law: To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Take away or greatly reduce the force of gravity, and thrusting just pushes the object of one’s affections away. †
Unlike the spotted seal, astronauts have not been put in a swimming pool for the purposes of figuring out how it’s done. Regardless of what the late G. Harry Stine says in his book Living in Space:
Back in the 1980s, some clandestine experiments were conducted very late at night in the neutral buoyancy weightless simulation tank at NASA’s George C. Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The experimental results showed that yes, it is indeed possible for humans to copulate in weightlessness. However, they have trouble staying together. The covert researchers discovered that it helped to have a third person to push at the right time in the right place. The anonymous researchers…discovered that this is the way dolphins do it. A third dolphin is always present during the mating process. This led to the creation of the space-going equivalent of aviation’s Mile High Club known as the Three Dolphin Club.
Stine is best known for writing science fiction, and seemed unable to shake the habit while writing nonfiction. Or did someone at Marshall perhaps start the rumor? I wrote to a public affairs officer there to see if anyone could shed light on the story’s origins. Squirreliness ensued: “Hi, Mary. I’m including our historian, Mike Wright, on this email as he can probably fill you in on some historical information about the Neutral Buoyancy Lab. The short answer is, yes, we used to have a Neutral Buoyancy Lab at the Marshall Center, but it was closed (Mike can provide dates) and the work was subsequently done at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.” It was as though my email had made no mention of sex or G. Harry Stine.
Based on his dolphin accuracy quotient, Stine is not to be trusted. In the words of America’s preeminent dolphin expert, Randall Wells, “Only two dolphins are required for mating.” Upon further pestering, Wells noted that a second male sometimes helps corral a female but no helpful coital pushing has been observed. One possible reason a third dolphin isn’t called for is that the dolphin’s penis is prehensile.* Georgetown University dolphin researcher Janet Mann told me it can “hook into the female” and keep her close for the few seconds the male needs to finish his business. However, it was Mann’s feeling that the males needed this advantage not so much because it was hard to stay coupled while floating, but because females usually roll over and try to escape. From what I hear about male astronauts, this is not an issue.
As for the research experiment Stine described, it makes little sense. Why would NASA employees risk losing their jobs when the same “experiment” could be carried out in a backyard swimming pool? And why would you even need a formal experiment? As astronaut Roger Crouch said, in an email, a couple that wanted to have sex in space would simply do what couples on Earth do: “just start out and get better by experience.”
As for Stine’s claim about participants having “trouble staying together,” Crouch was dismissive. “Nothing restricts the use of arms and legs to manipulate or cling to each other. Once one of the participants has attached his or her feet or body firmly”—and here he suggested duct tape if all else failed—“the rest would be up to the imagination of the participants. The Kama Sutra couldn’t start to cover all the possibilities.”
I had written to Crouch about a different sex-in-space Internet hoax—NASA Publication 14-307-1792: a fabricated circa-1989 “post-flight summary” of the results of an exploration, supposedly carried out on shuttle mission STS-75, of “approaches to continued marital relations in the zero G orbital environment.” It was the first hoax I’ve ever come across that cited another hoax—Stine’s “similar experiments undertaken in a neutral buoyancy tank.”
With “a pneumatic sound-deadening barrier” erected between the decks for privacy, an astronaut couple supposedly tried out ten positions, four of them “natural,” and six involving mechanical restraints. Position No. 10 was one of two selected as “most satisfactory”: “Each partner gripping the other’s head between their thighs.” The report concluded with a recommendation to screen future astronaut couples based on “their ability to accept or adapt to the solutions used in runs 3 and 10” and a reference to a forthcoming astronaut sex training video. Incredibly, two authors of space books, over the years, swallowed the bait and presented Document 14-307-1792 as fact in their books. A quick visit to the NASA Web site would have revealed that shuttle m
ission STS-75 flew in 1996, seven years after the “document” appeared, and, P.S., had an all-male crew.
DOZENS OF ASTRONAUTS have flown on coed crews. One shuttle crew included a couple who’d fallen in love during training and tied the knot without telling NASA, just before their flight. It’s hard to imagine that all these men and women, without exception, have resisted temptation. Privacy may have been scarce on the Space Shuttle, but not on multimodule space stations like Mir and the International Space Station. Valery Polyakov and the fetching Yelena Kondakova spent five months together on Mir. “We were torturing Valery about whether they had sex,” cosmonaut Alexandr Laveikin told me. “He said, ‘Don’t ask these questions.’” Kondakova is married to cosmonaut Valery Ryumin, which helps explain why Polyakov would have needed to keep his flight suit, or his mouth, zipped. Laveikin shared a Russian saying that seems to have both lost and gained something in translation: “Mystery is the thing where love hides its arrows.” Or as space maven James Oberg put it (borrowing an old military aphorism): “Them what says, don’t know, and them what knows, don’t say.”
NASA doesn’t specifically address sex in its rules of conduct. Its Astronaut Code of Professional Responsibility includes a vague Boy Scout Oath–style pledge, “We will strive to avoid the appearance of impropriety.” To me, that just means, Don’t get caught. The ISS Crew Code of Conduct—which is actually part of the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations—is similarly circumspect: “No ISS crewmember shall…act in a manner which results in or creates the appearance of: (1) giving undue preferential treatment to any person or entity in the performance of ISS activities…” That is one way to look at a sexual dalliance: undue preferential treatment.
