Advertisement

Frisky Vacations in Space

(Page 3 of 4)

But wait, it gets better. Zero gravity does some amazing things to your body. Suddenly your blood is no longer pulled downward by gravity. Wrinkles in your face disappear. Your face becomes fuller, younger looking. Your chest expands. And you grow taller. Early astronauts noted that their spacesuits were a little smaller on the moon. Once they were free of the Earth's gravity, their spines stretched out a few inches.

"If you look at astronaut pictures from before liftoff and from mid-flight," Kustenmacher says, "they look like father and son shots."

Now, floating around might create some problems in those intimate moments, but Meyers and others are thinking of solutions to save frisky folks from bouncing off the capsule walls. "I see couples floating and tied to each other with bungee cords," he says. "So you could snap your sweetheart back into your arms when necessary."

Family-planning advocates take heart: Many experts think it would be impossible for a woman to conceive in a weightless environment, which would make birth control absolutely free.

Of course, many astronauts have complained of nausea, and that the capsule's smell was less than enticing. But we hope future technology will address those issues.

At Rochester, students are looking at all human life in space. "When you look into commercialization of space, you have to keep your eyes open and think out of the box," says Wallington. "Some folks have kicked around the idea of televising sports from space. Up there, the average man might jump higher than Michael Jordan. It might make for fantastic TV."

Was That in the Brochure?

The space travel option might be at least a few years away, but folks love to sit and fantasize. "I knew there would be a market for it," Kustenmacher says of the Frommer's guide. "It's still my dream vacation."

As it does with almost every other tourist destination, Frommer's points out the downsides to space travel, along with a crater-by-crater rundown of all the can't-miss sites. Just as in a lot of exotic locales, it might not be so easy to find a toilet in space that you'd be comfortable using. The astronauts used a vacuum apparatus that might scare off the squeamish.

Marketplace