The Pin
February 21 2020, 12:29 pm
Mark Lee and Jan Davis met at some point in 1992. No one noticed that when they were together, sparks jumped between them, and despite themselves, they had no choice but to hide it. Both were being trained by NASA for an important space mission aboard the shuttle Endeavor. For a whole year, they were secret in their spare time. Until weeks before starting the mission, they decided to get married. He did not sit well with his superiors, but found no way to justify the suspension of the program. Therefore, the two lovers lived what could be the most remote honeymoon in history, thousands of miles from the ground and without gravity. It is inevitable to think badly when imagining what that mission was like.
By: The Confidential
From that moment, NASA has adapted its policies to prohibit marriages or emotional relationships on board spacecraft. Obviously, the fact of taking people into space involves previously putting together such rigorous planning that the relations that the crew members must also be monitored with magnifying glass, since they could cause an earthquake inside the ship that would subtract the chances of success of the mission.
After all, it is the eternal struggle between reason and emotion, which in this case also shows that they can happen together. Well, beyond the scientific coldness demanded by a profession as risky as that of astronauts, there is room for passions. We are human beings and we have feelings, as a former protagonist of Spanish politics would have liked to say, and our actions are not only regulated by mathematical or physical calculations, but also by moods and hormones. And in this sense, it is very risky to put into play space missions that are decisive for the history of mankind to a greater or lesser extent by a love story, or as it is said colloquially, by “a simple dust”.
“I think that at some point we will have to address the issue of sexuality in space,” said Paul Root Wolpe, director of the Ethics Center of Emory University and a specialist in bioethics a few years ago, in statements collected by the magazine ‘Vice ‘. “I don’t know if NASA has an official policy on sex in space, but there will be a time when it will be necessary to address these issues.”
Simon Dubé and Dave Anctil are two Canadian researchers who have offered a solution to the lack of affection to which astronauts and people who in the future travel to space for mere leisure or scientific eagerness could be subjected. They have published an investigation in which they ask for the use of those known as ‘erobots’ to meet the carnal needs of the protagonists of the missions. “The term encompasses all virtual artificial erotic agents, incorporated or augmented, and the technologies that have produced them,” they say in ‘The Conversation’. “For example, sex robots, erotic chatbots or virtual or augmented reality couples. “Erotic” is an emerging transdisciplinary science that studies the interactions between humans and robots, and how they relate. “
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