7. "NASA Sutra"

Integrating Women into the Astronaut Corps: Politics and Logistics at NASA, 1972–2004

CHAPTER 7
“NASA Sutra”

When NASA’s administrators made the decision to include women in the astronaut corps, probably few people truly were aware of all the potential consequences of such a move. Developing the hardware and equipment was definitely challenging, but not nearly as controversial as the social ramifications of mixed-sex crews and female astronauts for NASA’s long-term human space agenda. As NASA moves toward longer-duration flights, extended stays aboard the International Space Station, missions to Mars and nearby asteroids, and presumably colonization of the Moon or other planets, the agency will have to explore more deeply the issues of health and sexuality. In turn, how NASA has handled these matters can be used to analyze the agency’s legacy with regard to the integration of female astronauts.

In November 1998, John Glenn completed his second flight in space. This time, instead of orbiting the Earth in a one-person Mercury spacecraft, Glenn served as a payload specialist aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery. NASA justified his selection as a crew member of STS-95 by his advanced age. At 77 years old, Glenn made a good test subject for medical experiments that would hopefully yield valuable data about health concerns for the country’s older population. That factor and the public affairs success story of returning one of America’s great heroes to space seemed justification enough to send Glenn up one more time. The problem was that the combination of medicine and public affairs did not apparently hold as an argument for sending women into space.

In March 1999, four months after Glenn’s flight, Dr. Arnauld Nicogossian, NASA’s chief life scientist, proposed a mission with an all-female Space Shuttle crew. The rationalization that he shared with the press as his reason for such a mission was science. A CNN news article explained, “With a new space station on the horizon and increasing talk of trips to Mars, NASA wants to make sure it protects the health of all its astronauts, male and female.” The report continued, “But just as with Earth-bound medical research, most of what it knows has been gleaned from men, and projecting results onto women could be dangerous.”¹ The argument made sense. But proposing an all-female flight, particularly at a time when NASA was still enjoying the public success of John Glenn’s return to space, caused some to ask whether this flight was really more than just a gimmick.² The subject became such a sensitive topic both inside and outside of NASA that by May 1999 only Nicogossian and NASA administrator Dan Goldin were authorized to discuss the proposal publicly. Goldin instructed everyone at JSC to refer all questions about an all-female Shuttle crew directly to NASA Headquarters.³

Historically NASA has performed better medical research on women than most organizations in the United States. In a June 1994 talk that Carolyn Huntoon, then JSC director, delivered at the 2nd Annual Women’s Health and Space Luncheon, she stated, “Unlike so much of the research performed here on the ground, NASA is performing these investigations on both male and female astronauts.” She noted, “Twenty-three women have been chosen for the astronaut corps since 1978. Nineteen have collectively spent more than 7,000 hours in the laboratory of space.” Four of those women were medical doctors (Fisher, Seddon, Ellen Baker, selected in 1984; and Mae Jemison, the first African American female astronaut, selected in 1987).⁴ Huntoon observed, “Their personal insights into the effects of microgravity on the female body have been invaluable and have laid the groundwork for future research.”⁵ In a 2002 interview, she argued that there was no better collection of medical data on women undergoing physiological changes than what NASA had compiled.⁶

Huntoon’s analysis may well be correct. Beginning in 1978 when the first women astronauts arrived in Houston, a selected portion of every astronaut’s medical data was included in the Longitudinal Study of Astronaut Health (LSAH) database. By 1999, NASA had begun compiling a second medical database called the Life Sciences Data Archive (LSDA).⁷ But as astronaut and physician Rhea Seddon argued about that archive, it is very difficult to get enough good data that a doctor or researcher interested in medical issues affecting women can use effectively. “Usually there’s only one woman on a flight. So you have to look at it long-term. [On top of that,] the flights are all different. Getting good information that you can look at across the group of women was going to be kind of hard.” Seddon acknowledged, “We’ve gotten some information on my Spacelab flights. We had women [aboard] so that we could maybe get women and men on the same flight, doing the same experiments. But it’s just that we haven’t made [women’s health] a real focus.”⁸

Once NASA made the announcement that it was considering an all-female crew, the agency then had to justify the flight. This is normal. Because each Shuttle launch cost an average of $450 million, every mission needed to be scientifically, militarily, or commercially justified.⁹ Most flights, however, do not create the same kind of public interest that the all-female flight attracted. As Washington Post staff writer Kathy Sawyer observed, “After all, nobody makes a fuss about an all-guy flight.”¹⁰ According to Administrator Goldin, justifying the flight involved deciding whether there were research opportunities that merited a dedicated mission. NASA scientists would then design the experiments. Once the scientists determined the actual experiments for the flight, only then would the astronaut office assign the crew as test subjects, be it all male, all female, or a mixed crew.¹¹

Immediately following the proposal’s announcement, some women at NASA (as well as many private citizens) went on record about such a flight. Millie Hughes-Fulford, who flew as a biomedical payload specialist in June 1991 aboard STS-40, saw the flight as a great opportunity to learn whether women lose bone and calcium in space at the same rate as men. Former astronaut Kathryn Thorton (selected in 1984 and resigned from NASA in 1996 after flying four missions) worried that the women’s privacy might be at risk. She said, “I don’t know why it would be necessary to have them all on the same flight. Everyone would know these seven women on all these different tests.”¹² Chief scientist for the International Space Station Kathryn Clark seemed torn: “If an all-female crew is selected to fly, I’m sure there will be great science on that mission. I just don’t know that it would be better science than if it’s an all-male crew or a mixed crew.”¹³

As part of the evaluation process for an all-female flight, NASA called on the National Space Biological Research Institute (NSBRI) for help. The NSBRI sponsored an investigation on gender-specific space medicine. The team, led by physician and former astronaut Rhea Seddon (resigned from NASA in 1997), conducted a two-day workshop in Houston. The team evaluated NASA’s knowledge base in human spaceflight, the status of current and proposed medical treatments for maintaining the astronauts’ health during and after flight, training and flight procedures related to the astronauts’ health, and human-machine interfaces, all with a special emphasis on gender-and sex-related questions.¹⁴ The panel not only looked into what data NASA had collected and archived about women’s health and the agency’s future plans, but also talked to a number of the active female astronauts about their willingness to participate in an all-female flight.¹⁵ The final report, submitted to NASA on September 30, 1999, offered a somewhat frustrating picture of NASA’s history regarding women’s issues.

While opponents of the flight questioned whether microgravity even affected the sexes differently, the workshop members reported that a few of NASA’s studies showed definite measurable differences between the sexes, specifically susceptibility to postflight orthostatic hypotension, a form of low blood pressure that a person experiences when rising from a prone or seated position.¹⁶ But after twenty-one years of data collection on women’s health—and sixteen years of flight data collection—the report read, “No spaceflight data exists but differences could be predicted for several symptoms (post-menopausal bone loss, iron intake requirements, muscle strength and endurance).” It continued, “In still other areas, spaceflight data has not been collected and prediction of gender differences is not possible but studying them is important for long term health, safety and performance (decompression sickness susceptibility, pharmacokinetics, immune function, radiation sensitivity, and psychosocial adaptation).”¹⁷ The team argued that one of the most important reasons for NASA’s life science research program was to understand the physiological changes that might affect an astronaut’s performance and health once he or she returned to Earth, and that if physiological differences inherent to one’s sex might lead to more effective treatment methods, NASA should investigate them.

The group understood that NASA could not dedicate extensive time to inflight medical research for either men or women given the technical and financial limitations of the space program at that point in time. Ideally, the completion of the International Space Station would change that. But until then, NASA scientists emphasized ground-based research that included female subjects to draw some conclusions about the impact an astronaut’s sex has on their health. But astronauts typically are not terribly interested in participating in medical experiments, a statement that holds true for both men and women. Based on conversations with other female astronauts and her own experiences in the corps, Rhea Seddon explained that the women astronauts were resistant to being singled out as guinea pigs. Seddon said, “Most astronauts don’t really enjoy life science flights. They’d rather be doing docking missions, construction missions, big things.”¹⁸ But the women also felt strongly about being treated as equals, and not as women astronauts. She confided that the women did not want a special flight “set aside” just for them. “In other words, men, you don’t need to apply. They didn’t want it to be that kind of a selection. They want to be part of the office. They want to be in the same rotation. They want to be considered for the same jobs.”¹⁹ Just as the first six women in the astronaut corps had insisted on equal treatment and equal opportunities with respect to flight assignments, so did the women who would have served on an all-female flight crew had that flight come to fruition.

In concluding their report, the workshop team stated, “There are several health care issues unique to the female astronaut population that NASA must address. A firm commitment to equipment and task design to optimize job performance and safety is required.”²⁰ The health consequences of spaceflight may be extraordinarily important to study, but for the women astronauts, and consequently for NASA’s administrators who had worked to get women into the space program, there was also a risk. If studies on sex differences showed that being an astronaut presented a greater health risk to women than men, NASA might feel forced to ground the women. The political consequences to NASA had the agency grounded the women in the late 1970s or early 1980s because they were the weaker sex—or at least the more vulnerable sex—likely would have been disastrous. Seddon explained, “I think to a certain extent, the reason that a lot of those [differences] hadn’t been addressed is it was a nonissue. How are women different? Let’s treat is as a nonissue until it becomes an issue.” She continued, “Don’t try to find out how women are weaker than men or how women are better than men. The women in the program just really didn’t ever want that, especially early on when there was a question of whether women were going to make it in the space shuttle or not.”²¹ Seddon concluded that NASA did not want the women excluded because of what medical studies might have uncovered either. “NASA didn’t want to fund a lot of studies to look at sex differences; it’s a hot potato.”²²

In 1999, when Nicogossian proposed the all-female flight, one that essentially would be looking into sex differences, it was still a hot potato. The public’s criticism of an all-female flight did not focus not on whether the potential sex-based or gender-based experiments were valid scientifically, but on whether it was really just a public affairs stunt. Sherry Marts, the scientific director of the Society for the Advancement of Women’s Health Research, argued that the flight would be a mistake if it exploited women for merely political or public relations purposes. “My fear is this (flight) would be just a feel-good mission. It may be that now that they’ve sent a senior citizen into space, it’s time to send some women.”²³ The unfortunate reality of this criticism was that an all-female flight would have been a great public affairs event for NASA and for women. Rhea Seddon understood the flight as just that. “After we had chosen some women pilot-types and after John Glenn had flown and we saw all of the interest in his flight, particularly in the older population, and the inspirational effects, [people at NASA said], ‘Wow! NASA got a lot of good publicity about that. What else can we do?’ And Arnauld said, ‘I think we should have an all-female crew.’”²⁴ Even Dan Goldin agreed. “The fact that young girls will see an all-woman crew, I think, could be a huge inspiration and impact on the future of education.” But he understood that “first we establish the science, then we establish the inspiration.”²⁵

No advocate of human spaceflight would be acting responsibly if he or she advocated any flight for public relations reasons alone. Even during the height of the space race, NASA was careful to use each flight as a technological and scientific learning experience. But in an environment where sending an entire crew of women into space on a mission dedicated to medical science could be justified by NASA’s long-term human spaceflight agenda, it is unfortunate that such a mission has not materialized. One anonymous letter to the editor sent to the Salt Lake Tribune lamented that political and public pressure might result in NASA’s decision against an all-female flight. It read, “An agency that already has sent two senators into orbit—former Utah Sen. Jake Garn and former astronaut and Ohio Sen. John Glenn, the latter ostensibly to study the effect of aging in a space environment—can hardly argue that it is not appropriate or that there is little or nothing that can be learned as a result [of an all-female flight].”²⁶

One female letter writer from Syracuse, New York, wrote of the proposal, “This sounds like an effort to end sexism, but up until now medical research at NASA has been aimed at men. If women are to be truly recognized as competent astronauts, they must be placed in important roles in a coed space shuttle mission.” She continued, “To end misconceptions and sexism, women should be in all flights not just being a leader on an all-women flight.”²⁷ While the letter writer does seem unaware of the fact that NASA had been collecting medical data from women astronauts since 1983, that Eileen Collins had already piloted the Space Shuttle Discovery (STS-63) in 1995, and that she was scheduled to command a flight aboard Columbia that July, her comments echo the arguments against an all-female flight made by the women astronauts themselves.²⁸ One agency insider observed that the female astronauts are “insulted by anything that smacks of gimmickry or implies their skills somehow don’t measure up.”²⁹

When NASA administrator Jim Fletcher started pushing to get women into the astronaut corps, some throughout the NASA organization were concerned that the women might fail as astronauts. Therefore, NASA was quick to recognize the service and achievements of women as astronauts. In 1993, when then chief astronaut Robert “Hoot” Gibson felt he unintentionally gave the impression to Space News that women were being excluded from applying for flights aboard the Soviet space station Mir, he moved quickly to rectify the mistake. He wrote in a letter back to Space News, “We are justifiably very proud of the many contributions to the space program made by our women astronauts, both in the flight environment as well as in the flight planning, flight support, and management roles. The contributions made by women will certainly increase in the coming years and will include participation in the Mir missions.”³⁰ Gibson’s response gave credence to the argument that NASA valued its female astronauts. The decision not to fly an all-female mission in light of the negative press the proposal received further suggests that NASA believed that women astronauts were more than just show and resisted flying a mission that would suggest such a perspective.

Part of NASA’s justification for not pursuing an all-female mission with more vigor can be traced back to the NSBRI workshop’s final conclusions. Even with less than two full days to investigate the question of women’s health in spaceflight, it was clear to the workshop participants that the agency needed to commit itself to addressing a number of concerns related to the health of its female astronauts and their job opportunities. But none of the recommendations actually required flying all-female crews.³¹ That conclusion most certainly pleased the women in the astronaut corps.

Women astronauts had already provided valuable medical data through their participation in other missions. The two Spacelab Life Science missions (STS-40 in June 1991 and STS-58 in October-November 1993) that were dedicated solely to medical research included four female astronauts and produced five sets of female data (Rhea Seddon flew aboard both missions).³² Further, when astronaut Shannon Lucid returned from her 188-day stay in space aboard the Russian space station Mir, the information that she was able to provide the flight surgeons about exercise and bone and muscle loss consequently helped NASA’s life science researchers develop new exercise techniques for the astronauts on long-duration flights.³³ Although the NSBRI workshop emphasized NASA’s need to dedicate more attention to the potentially different health risks to male and female astronauts, if the agency continued to select and fly women at a rate at least representative of their numbers in the astronaut corps, the physicians and researchers should get enough information to make informed decisions about how to protect the health of the astronauts and perhaps develop treatments for similar health concerns on Earth.

One of NASA’s greatest concerns regarding astronaut health has always been protecting them from the potential side effects of spaceflight. Yet, the NSBRI workshop team felt that one particular issue affecting female astronauts had largely been ignored since women were introduced to the astronaut corps, but it needed to be addressed: pregnancy. Every woman who NASA has selected for the astronaut corps was selected during her child-bearing years. Consequently, the issue of pregnancy (planned or unplanned, desired or undesired) affects every one of them and their jobs. Since 1978 when women joined the astronaut corps, the Astronaut Office’s policy has been that no pregnant astronauts would be permitted to fly. Further, should a woman not yet assigned to a flight start trying to conceive, the Astronaut Office would remove her from the flight rotation during the time that she is actively attempting to become pregnant.³⁴

NASA’s concern is twofold. First, the amount of time astronaut crews spend preparing for their missions is significant, usually one full year. If pregnant astronauts were given flight assignments and then a problem develops with the pregnancy or the birth itself prevents her from completing the training or the flight, there is no effective way to replace her with a backup and still retain the same level of proficiency and crew cohesion. In black-and-white terms, this policy is discriminatory. When asked, however, Rhea Seddon admitted that when her husband, Hoot Gibson, was chief of the Astronaut Office, she watched him deal with the challenge of developing the flight schedules, which are done years in advance. Based on her observations, she understood why the policy was the right practice:

You’re assigned to a crew, and you may spend a year planning for that mission that’s going to go at some point in the rotation. If you’re assigned to a crew that’s been all nicely mapped out, and suddenly you become pregnant, there’s this quandary…. “Now what? Who do we put in there? How close to flight is it? What does that do to the rest of my planning? So I can understand that they [in the Astronaut Office] would like very much for you to let them know if you are trying to get pregnant, may be pregnant, or may have a baby in nine months.³⁵

Second, there is no evidence that spaceflight is safe for either the mother or the fetus. Decalcification of bones, muscle deterioration, and radiation represent some of the greatest health risks to astronauts generally. But what those factors could mean for the development of a human fetus is largely unknown. Adding the physical strain that pregnancy puts on the female body led NASA’s flight surgeons to decide that the best preventative measure for keeping astronauts healthy during flight—which is their primary function—is to ground any who are pregnant.

If NASA’s policy is that no pregnant astronaut will fly because of the potential risk to her and the fetus, then why bother devoting experiment time and space aboard the Shuttle or ISS to questions of reproduction and gestation in space? Was the Astronaut Office looking for a reason to change the policy? Two experiments on reproduction and embryonic development in particular that NASA has publicized both suggested that a developing fetus could experience significant problems. In 1982, the crew of STS-3 flew a collection of houseflies to observe their egg-laying rates. One of the primary researchers, John Baust, a biologist from the University of Houston, indicated that because the chemical reactions during reproduction in houseflies are similar to humans, “Flies provide a model system that may hint at problems man could face in space.”³⁶ The researchers found that the houseflies flown aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia laid 57 percent fewer eggs than the control flies left on Earth. During Shannon Lucid’s stay on Mir, she conducted an experiment studying the development of embryos in fertilized Japanese quail eggs. Those embryos experienced an abnormality rate of 13 percent—a rate four times higher than the rate among the control embryos.³⁷ NASA’s concerns about the health of a fetus, at least early in its development, and the agency’s policy against flying pregnant women seem justified.

Ultimately, what the NSBRI committee was trying to accomplish with its evaluation of current NASA policy regarding pregnancy was to flesh out the impact of being an astronaut on a woman’s ability to also have a family. Overall, the astronaut’s health was first and foremost; her health was compulsory to her job. But grounding an astronaut when she is pregnant fails to address all the issues. What if she conceived during a mission? Instead of pushing for more research into the effects of spaceflight on pregnancy, the workshop group proposed that NASA provide individual counseling regarding effective birth control. But what is effective birth control in space? The committee noted that “no data exists on the pharmacodynamics of birth control pills in zero gravity and this should be studied to insure efficacy.”³⁸ The committee expressed concern about the lack of research on birth control pills given that the pill also has noncontraceptive benefits, specifically “maintenance of bone density, reduction of the risk of ovarian cysts, ovarian cancer, anemia and benign breast disease,” and menstrual control.³⁹

When Arnauld Nicogossian asked Seddon to chair the NSBRI panel, he was looking for reasons to justify an all-female flight. Seddon believed that the points the panel made (and ultimately issues that NASA needed to address) were things that the women astronauts stressed were “nonissues” up to that point. Menstruation, on the other hand, has largely remained a nonissue. Initially, NASA’s flight surgeons expressed concerns about how menstruation would work in space. Seddon recalled, “We got together with all the flight surgeons, and they said, ‘Ok, no one knows, but menstrual flow may go retrograde and come out your tubes and into your abdomen, and you may have an acute abdomen in space, and what would we do?’ “⁴⁰ Until someone had a period in space, no one could answer those questions. But the first six women insisted that NASA only address the issue if menstruation in space proved to be a problem.

Still, not knowing what would happen, the flight surgeons prepared contingency plans for the first “menstrual cycle in space.” NASA could not tell the women to take hormones to suppress their cycles, although that is an option should the women choose that course for themselves. Instead, they packed the personal hygiene kits with up to a hundred tampons or pads (based on the astronaut’s preference) in case her flow was particularly heavy and the flight needed to be extended to the maximum two-week duration. It would take a woman with a normal cycle months to use up that supply. But until a woman had her period in space, no one knew what number would be adequate. The women astronauts and the flight surgeons chose to handle it in an ad hoc manner. Seddon said, “We picked a number and the flight surgeons would say, ‘Let’s double it just in case.’”⁴¹ Once the flight surgeons understood how menstruation was affected by microgravity, then they could adjust the quantity of tampons or napkins accordingly.

Given that NASA could not legally require the women astronauts to suppress their menstrual cycle with hormones, the flight surgeons along with the women figured out a way to deal with it in space. But birth control and pregnancy, while equally important, were not so pressing. Through the Astronaut Office’s policy of not flying pregnant astronauts, the agency as a whole was able to avoid dealing with the subjects. Carolyn Huntoon said in a 2003 interview, “We know a great deal, a tremendous amount about what happens to us when we go into space, and then [there is] a lot of stuff that we don’t know that we could know.”⁴² Pregnancy is one of those areas about which NASA knows very little. If NASA’s policy does not permit pregnant astronauts to fly, some might ask why it should matter whether we know more about how pregnancy is affected by microgravity. The potential that NASA’s human spaceflight program will participate in future missions to the Moon, Mars, or nearby asteroids or perhaps interplanetary colonization defines the need for that kind of knowledge.

On January 14, 2004, President George W. Bush announced a new space initiative that called for extended human presence on the Moon and human missions to Mars.⁴³ In April 2010 President Barack Obama announced his plan to transform human spaceflight, working with commercial ventures to develop deep space capacity.⁴⁴ For NASA to follow through with such an agenda, the agency must address human sexuality and reproduction among the astronauts. Unless the Astronaut Office openly restricts the missions to a single sex, either men or women, there must be a concerted effort to address the drought of knowledge on human pregnancy, sex, and the effectiveness of birth control in microgravity. Huntoon agreed, “They’ve tried to start addressing them in a cellular level and with animals. But it’s going to have to be addressed in humans.”⁴⁵

NASA is a public agency; therefore, its image in the public eye directly affects the overall national willingness to support its activities. Because federal law protects all citizens from participating in medical tests against their wishes and protects the privacy of their medical information, NASA could no more force a female astronaut to fly while pregnant than it could demand any astronaut to provide a urine or blood sample as part of a medical test. Doing so would be illegal, unethical, and possibly a step toward the destruction of American support for a federally funded space program. But, assuming that space exploration continues with mixed-sex crews and that long-duration missions become more typical, the probability of a human pregnancy in space increases. Unfortunately, NASA would likely be judged on how the agency handles that situation most zealously in the court of public opinion. If the status of the mission precludes bringing the pregnant astronaut back to Earth, NASA might well be held partially culpable for the outcome of the pregnancy. The agency might even be critiqued for not addressing previously the issue of pregnancy with more fervor. At the same time, legally NASA cannot prevent its astronauts from having sexual intercourse with each other in flight—nor should it, given the importance of sexuality as a healthy part of human life, according to Dr. Raymond Noonan, whose research explores human sexuality.⁴⁶ Nor can the agency force its astronauts to use birth control. As NASA prepares its long-term agenda for human spaceflight, this is one of the issues that the agency has to face regardless of whether American taxpayers deem it appropriate or not.

While the Astronaut Office reached the decision to restrict pregnant astronauts from flying as a measure to protect the health of its people, the policy itself has protected NASA as a whole from moral and ethical scrutiny. The policy concerning sexual activity served the latter purpose as well. Although unwritten, NASA’s policy on sexual intercourse for the astronauts during a mission is “Don’t ask. Tell us if you want to.” With such a policy, NASA could collect data and information from any astronaut willing to report back on his or her experiences, yet still maintain a position of plausible deniability about sex in space and avoid the ethical backlash. In recent years, the number of rumors and theories about sex between astronauts and between cosmonauts floating through cyberspace seems to have exploded, culminating in the publication of Pierre Kohler’s book La Dernière Mission (The Last Mission) in 2000, which argued that the space agencies in both the United States and Russia sponsored sex experiments in orbit.⁴⁷ NASA’s policy of not promoting, encouraging, or necessarily even discussing sexual activity in space worked to diffuse much of Kohler’s hype.⁴⁸

But with the introduction of women into the astronaut corps, the subsequent marriages between astronauts, and the mixed-sex nature of the crews, NASA, at the very least, has had to think about intercourse in space. For the short-duration missions (as on the Shuttle), the psychological effects of isolation and minimal opportunities for sexual expression tend not to play a factor in an astronaut’s ability to perform his or her job. For that reason alone, NASA has been able to avoid addressing the sex question. As NASA spokesperson Ed Campion said and Rhea Seddon echoed, “We depend and rely on the professionalism and good judgment of our astronauts.”⁴⁹ But the subject never seemed far away. According to the NASA Standard 3000, the crew quarters design configurations included “quarters for two individuals who want privacy (i.e., married couples).”⁵⁰

NASA has never been in a position to prevent astronauts from having sexual intercourse in space. But with the potential for permanent colonies on the Moon and perhaps missions to Mars, the agency cannot ignore the body of research that deals with the psychological impact of human emotional isolation (inducing the suppression of sexual drives), mostly from studies conducted at overwinter research stations in Antarctica and undersea habitats.⁵¹ However, the social boundaries that seemed to exist around the topic of sex have kept NASA from addressing it wholeheartedly or openly up to now. When asked in 2003 whether sex and pregnancy were issues that NASA could truly address, Carolyn Huntoon replied sadly, “I don’t know that it can.”⁵²