Can We Actually Have Sex in Space?

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Space travel has come a long way since Shawna Pandya, an emergency physician and commercial astronaut, began carving out her niche studying women’s health in microgravity in the mid-2010s. At the time, she saw the field as the ideal way to combine her twin careers and thought that, soon enough, this kind of expertise would be in demand. Today, companies like Axiom and Voyager Space are inching forward with plans to build luxury escapes in Earth’s orbit. By the 2030s, Pandya says, money will be the only thing standing between travelers and a space hotel: “And I think we all know what people do in hotels.”

Some of the commercial space industry’s power brokers have even grander plans. Elon Musk, for one, is predicting a million human settlers on Mars by 2050. But while sex in space is a fun fantasy, we’re far from ready, Pandya says. Long-haul space travel brings bigger issues: sexual health, childbirth, raising kids, survival of the species. These topics have historically made taxpayer-funded space agencies, like NASA, squeamish, so there’s little research so far. But companies like Musk’s SpaceX are barreling ahead, assuming that these details will get worked out along the way.

Former Air Force space operations officer  Alex Layendecker is, like Pandya, a pioneer in a new field: astrosexology. In 2023, he founded ASRI, the Advanced SpaceLife Research Institute, a research hub focus­ing on everything from sex in zero gravity to conception in the cosmos. It’s not an easy job to explain to people, he says: “They don’t believe you. It’s not a line I would ever drop in a bar.”

This was a major departure from Layendecker’s original plan to pursue a Ph.D. in the sexual dynamics of counter­intelligence. While working on his dissertation, he pivoted, in part because space sex and reproduction represented such uncharted territory. “I am a pro-space, pro-settling-other-worlds person,” Layendecker says. “But I am also pro-reality. And we need to not be stupid about how we go about this.”

ASRI is trying to meet the moment with a $20,000 annual budget—most of which is self-funded—and a volunteer army of 50 staffers, interns, scientists, and experts, Pandya among them. Together, they’re working to help earthlings answer questions that are critical to the future of the human race.

What’s it like to have sex in space?

It’s anybody’s guess. While sci-fi writers have been speculating on the prospect of cosmic coitus for more than half a century, there is yet to be a verified sexual encounter among the stars. In 2025, Simon Dubé, Ph.D., a Kinsey Institute research psychologist collaborating with ASRI, conducted a yet-to-be-published survey of 20 volunteers who were taking part in “analog” missions, simulated moon and Mars habitats where participants live for weeks cut off from the world, dining on rations and wearing space gear. Dubé found that such high-stress, low-privacy missions are libido killers. Desire and arousal plummeted across the board while sexual encounters were reportedly nonexistent, a pattern that Dubé dubbed “mission‑imposed abstinence—MIA.”

Microgravity further complicates matters. Additional unromantic hazards include blood and other fluids shifting in ways they don’t on Earth. Beyond these hurdles lies Newton’s third law: Bodies pushing together in microgravity will push one another apart. Inventive minds are already dreaming up solutions. One sci-fi writer proposed a Velcro-clad, conjoining “2suit,” while an early space tourism advocate designed a rigid, velvet-lined eight-foot tube for two, which he calls a “snuggle tunnel.”

“You’ve seen the lengths to which people have gone on this planet to get laid,” Layendecker says. “Humans are incredibly innovative.” Whatever stands in the way of membership in the 100-Mile High Club will be “just a speed bump.”

Can you actually make a baby up there?

In space as on Earth, one shouldn’t think about having sex without considering the potential outcomes. But for Layendecker, the question of off-world baby-making is an existential one. “Earth has already gone through five major mass extinctions,” he says. “We’re going through a sixth.” Between the impact of the climate crisis and the possibility of species-decimating conflicts, he says, if the human race doesn’t figure out off-world reproduction, “it is absolutely going to be a showstopper.”

The biggest challenge for human reproduction in space is, once again, gravity. “It’s the one constant we have had over 3.7 billion years,” Layendecker says. Until recently, only animal studies and tissue models could shed light on extraplanetary human reproductive health, but that’s changing: Pandya and Begum Mathyk, an ob-gyn and reproductive endocrinologist collaborating with ASRI, have helped develop the first IUD insertion experiment and the first study of the vaginal microbiome in microgravity.

Mathyk says she got involved in space research, including NASA training, after moving to Florida’s Space Coast and realizing that patients might soon begin asking her—for real—how to safely “honeymoon in space.”

Mathyk conducted one recent study aboard a retrofitted commercial aircraft with an onboard science lab. When it reaches cruising altitude, it goes into free fall, suspending gravity for about 20 seconds in stomach-turning parabolic oscillations that have earned the plane the nickname Vomit Comet. During one of these moments of microgravity, Mathyk captured sound wave images of her cervix while suspended in midair. She was performing science’s first zero-gravity ultrasound—a critical imaging test in women’s healthcare—just as a female astronaut may one day have to do on a small or solo mission.

“One moment you are grounded, and the next you are floating, trying to stabilize both yourself and the probe while maintaining image quality,” Mathyk says. The grainy scans of her own reproductive organs were “a first step toward demonstrating that gynecology can and should be part of operational space medicine.” Mathyk is now preparing her next set of microgravity experiments on off-world female physiology, designing protocols that Pandya hopes to carry out aboard an upcoming Virgin Galactic flight as part of IIAS-02—the first all-female research mission, which is currently seeking funding.

While the duo builds out a scientific understanding of the future of women’s reproductive health, SpaceBorn United, a start-up in the Netherlands, is developing a shoebox-size IVF machine capable of functioning in zero gravity. The company’s founder, Egbert Edelbroek, got interested in the field after becoming a sperm donor. In April 2025, his team successfully launched ARTIS, a prototype “space embryo incubator” loaded with yeast cells, on a SpaceX flight. The yeast survived the mission, and the onboard mini lab functioned as intended. Next, the company plans to launch fertilized mouse embryos into space. Thirty years from now, Edelbroek predicts, “We should have 100 babies on Mars.”

Will space babies be…different?

Studies show that every organ system—musculoskeletal, cardiovascular, immune, nervous, ophthalmic—undergoes changes in zero-G. “Now you have this rapidly developing, growing little human with rapidly evolving systems and dividing cells,” Pandya says. “How are they going to be affected?”

Scott Solomon, Ph.D., an evolutionary biologist and the author of Becoming Martian: How Living in Space Will Change Our Bodies and Minds, says space babies will open Pandora’s box. “Plans for living in space assume that all of this is going to work out fine,” Solomon says, “and yet we’ve got some pretty major blind spots.” Prolonged exposure to radiation and microgravity has been linked to a range of biological changes, including DNA mutations, cognitive changes, and bone density loss.

If having babies in space is even physiologically possible, the next hurdle is ethics. Children born off-world might never be able to come “home” to Earth, because their space-native immune systems couldn’t handle terrestrial germs. Space kids “would suddenly be breathing in huge amounts of bacteria and other microbes that they never interacted with before,” Solomon says.

What’s more, he adds, humans procreating in space would likely trigger epigenetic changes that might not show up for generations. What kinds of changes? A cohort of 20 female mice who spent six weeks orbiting Earth on a 2023 SpaceX flight offers our only real clue. After researchers brought the mice back to Earth and bred them, their granddaughters showed altered metabolic responses under dietary stress. Scientists saw parallels with the Hunger Winter, the mid-1940s famine in the Netherlands that had impacted the health of subsequent generations.

But in fall 2025, even as the data set continued to grow richer, NASA pulled the project’s funding. With the colony fated for euthanasia, University of Kansas researchers appealed to ASRI to help preserve the space mice’s bloodline. Layendecker raised $15,000 in bridge funding from a space-obsessed crypto community called MoonDAO to keep the creatures on life support. But any genetic clues they hold about humanity’s future are now on ice. The MoonDAO boost bought just enough time to cryopreserve embryos and tissue samples for future study.

What will happen to humanity if we don’t solve the riddle of space reproduction?

ASRI has a research road map plotted through 2055, by which point Layendecker hopes the first space baby will be alive and well. But right now, because of funding challenges and tension around IVF research, it’s tougher than ever to explore these topics. “It’s just not a good time for any kind of reproductive science” in the United States, Layendecker says. ASRI has considered moving its HQ from Cape Canaveral to Portugal for its more welcoming regulatory and funding climate.

But for members of the astrosexological community, time is of the essence. Pandya says the best time to study these issues was yesterday, and the second-best time is now. Humanity has “8 billion humans in one planetary basket,” she says. “There’s a joke in the space industry that the dinosaurs didn’t have a space program… And where are they now?”