The only private company that's launching people into space is often asked by its customers whether they can facilitate some zero-gravity hanky panky.
That's according to Tom Shelley, the president of Virginia-based Space Adventures, which has arranged eight successful launches of private citizens into orbit since 2001.
"It's actually not an uncommon request," Shelley told Tech Insider.
These days, Space Adventures uses Russian rockets to take people to the International Space Station (ISS) for around $50 million a seat. The company is also working on a mission that will take two people to the moon and back, which already sold for $150 million each.
Unlike NASA astronauts tasked with scientific research or making repairs on the ISS, private citizens don't really have things they must do in space. Most conducted their own personal experiments, while Canadian entrepreneur Guy Laliberté pulled off zero-g artistic performances.
For the most part, once civilians are on the ISS, the general rule is to just not break anything and enjoy the view. But for some space tourists, it seems, the view is not enough.
"There are a lot of people who want to fly with their partner, let's put it that way," Shelley said, though he warned they would be operating in very tight quarters, "plus you'd have to deal with the other people on ISS."
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He added: "They want to join the 300-mile-high club."
No one has yet been able to pull that one off, at least not on a Space Adventures flight. And both NASA and the Russian space agency vehemently deny any of their crew members have either.
But that didn't stop internet pornography company PornHub from launching a crowdfunding campaign last year to capture the deed on tape (the campaign was unsuccessful).
Interestingly enough, private companies don't seem to have a problem with the wishes of two consenting adults. Another company called zero2infinity advertises that possibility in its marketing materials, and even Shelley is not one to judge.
"If we were able to arrange it, we wouldn't have a problem with it," Shelley says, laughing. "Some of the crew might."
Even if sex did happen in space, Shelley thinks his clients probably wouldn't disclose that to the public. And besides concerns of privacy, a couple in space may have bigger issues when it comes to sex in that environment:
"One of the things that gravity helps us do is stay together, so sex in microgravity might actually be more difficult because you’re going to have to make sure that you’re always holding each other so you don’t drift apart," Paul Wolpe, a senior bioethicist at NASA, told VICE. "It might be a lot more challenging and a lot less fulfilling than most people think."
