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Comment by e12e | Hacker News Reader

I recall reading an interview with one of the Russian cosmonauts that stayed for a long time at Mir, mentioning something about a couple of wet dreams and then not really thinking much about sex for the rest of his (long) stay.

Can't find the link now, but I did see Canadian Chris Hadley make a similar (less explicit) comment in his Reddit ama: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1s4l7v/i_am_col_chris...

And while I'm sure people would like to think that the military have sex with each other all the time -- I'm pretty sure people manage to avoid having sex aboard submarines and other environments that are similar to a space expedition: dangerous and with long days filled with taxing work in the form of various experiments, exercises and routine tasks.

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> people would like to think that the military have sex with each other all the time...

This is, in fact, the case though. It's not unheard-of for personnel to have a casual boyfriend/girlfriend for the duration of a deployment, in a what-happens-in-vegas way.

I'm sorry if I was unclear, I meant that sex is not that common in deployments in constrained/mission environments without leave, like while on board a (small) submarine.

I'm actually not so sure about this, as people have sex all the time while aboard ship; a fan room usually ends up becoming the Love Shack. They're working 12-hour shifts and doing extra duty on top of that, and they're still banging. Careers get ruined when the woman shows up pregnant to sick call.

I don't know about submarines, mostly because they've been male-only until very recent, and attitudes on homosexuality have not been and still aren't very tolerant[1]. From the fact that Marines fuck in Porta-shitters in Afghanistan, I'm sure that life, er, finds a way.

[1] <insert ribald Navy joke here>

Ah, gotcha. I'd still wager it's more common than we think :)

Stress can really put the zap on even those at their reproductive peak. It is a very common experience for men going through USMC bootcamp to not have a single erection in the 3 months they're there. Same story during combat operations. I fought in Fallujah for 7 months and I can tell you that sex was near the bottom of my list of concerns. Sure the number of opportunities were low, but even pornography held no interest. The tales of sex on deployment occur in very low stress environments: Navy ships and mega-bases, between personnel who don't see combat and have ice cream socials...

I imagine a Martian outpost would initially be pretty stressful. Once it becomes safe enough, and the stress levels decrease, sex won't be a mission-success/safety concern any longer. That isn't to say that there shouldn't be a plan in place, but it isn't as big a deal as folks make it out to be.

Relationships flower with pheromones. As part of the space sickness pack - the sinus of every astronaut is swelling and they can not smell anything anymore. Thus love in space becomes unlikely, due to space?

Love on mars though - well gonna have to ask David Bowie for that.

The statistics about sexual assult of men by men in the military are very vague and shrouded in secrecy, but even the most 'optimistic' number paint pretty dismal picture.

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