Porn in Space
There's controversy about whether anyone has ever had sex in space. If they have, they're not admitting it. So given that, it's no surprise that there's never been pornography filmed in space. Though apparently not for lack of trying. Laura Woodmansee provides some details about this subject in her book Sex in Space:In the final days of the Mir, Russia was looking for new, capitalist ways to obtain funding to allow the space station to remain operational. One idea that was seriously considered involved allowing a production company to send a pair of actors to the space station to film the first pornographic movie in space. Originally titled, "Space Flight has a Price," the name was changed to "The Last Journey." The story follows a cosmonaut who refuses to leave his scheduled-to-be-abandoned space station, so ground controllers come up with the "brilliant idea" to send a woman up to seduce the wayward cosmonaut into returning home to Earth...
The porn stars were in top shape and ready to have sex in space. Yuri Koptev, the General Director of the Russian Space Agency at the time explained, "Life has made us change our mentality and one has to overcome snobbery when dozens of millions of dollars are involved."
Sadly, the pornographic Mir movie never did happen because the production company could only raise $7 million of the $23 million dollar price that the Russians demanded. The Russian Space Agency wanted the cash first and would not take promises to pay the balance after the film was released. Mir was de-orbited and crashed into the ocean in March 2001.
But Woodmansee notes that there has been pornography filmed in weightless conditions, aboard a plane flying in a ballistic arc flight path to produce temporary weightlessness. She writes:
The Spanish-produced sex video, The Uranus Experiment 2 includes a scene filmed in weightless flight. One particular segment is supposed to depict several male and female astronauts having sex in weightlessness, but was obviously filmed here on Earth, and no amount of rotating camera angles can fool the viewer into believing that this is a weightless shot. But at the end of the scene, the 20-second "money shot" is indeed filmed in weightless conditions on an aircraft.
Sex in Space is a curious book. Despite the racy title, it's actually pretty restrained. Woodmansee, a science journalist, notes that she attempted to balance "the giggle factor with serious scientific questions about reproduction and the future of humans in space."
Category: Pornography, Sexuality