THOUGH ASHLEY AND I ARE pioneers in spirit, it's unlikely we'll be the first to go where no couple has gone before. Men and women have been traveling together into space for 25 years—and people who keep track of such things believe that somewhere, somehow, at least one couple has already had sex up there. Early rumors emerged in 1982, with the first mixed-gender crew: Soviet cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya spent a week cooped up with cosmonauts Leonid Popov and Alexander Serebrov on the space station Salyut 7. Similar gossip surfaced again a decade later when Mark Lee and Jan Davis, married astronauts who have since divorced, flew together on the space shuttle Endeavour. But to this day neither will talk about whether they did or didn't.

Author Pierre Kohler wrote in his 2000 book The Final Mission that NASA had experimented with a variety of belts and tubes to test sexual positions on a 1996 shuttle flight. Kohler's source turned out to be a faked NASA document circulated on the Internet, but that hasn't stopped others from speculating. Web gossip abounds, and sites like Space.com and BoingBoing.net mention the Mir space station as the likeliest love shack. Elsewhere, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry has been quoted as saying, "I guarantee you it happened, for no reasons other than common sense."

The Russian Space Agency and NASA categorically deny any incidents of sex. "I don't even address the issue," grumbles Rick Searfoss, a former astronaut who piloted two shuttle missions and commanded a third. "These shrinks and academic weenies need to get a life. We are professionals and have a billion things to do on a mission."

But "humans are humans," counters John Spencer. "We will do it anywhere and any way we possibly can."

By 2018, NASA intends to return humans to the moon, where they'll build a lunar habitat. Astronauts will be confined for months inside the vessel, and they're not likely to spend all that time taking cold showers. "They're going to have sexual intercourse," declares Harvey Wichman, former director of the Aerospace Psychology Laboratory at Claremont McKenna College, in California.

Although NASA won't talk about it, scientists unaffiliated with the agency are taking the matter seriously. Earlier this year, the National Academy Press released a 144-page white paper titled "A Risk Reduction Strategy for Human Exploration of Space: A Review of NASA's Bioastronautics Roadmap."

It covers the usual topics: radiation exposure, bone loss, nutritional deficiencies. But buried in the report, the authors make a surprising notation. NASA's "roadmap" to space, they write, "contains no references to human sexuality, and this oversight should be corrected. . . . Areas of concern for the 30-month Mars mission include the potential psychological and physiological consequences of sexual activity, consequences that could endanger life, crew cohesion, performance, and mission success."

For now, daily detail on shuttle missions won't include romantic interludes—yes, the Martian probes will remain in the docking bay. "Privately, everyone I have talked to at NASA is in agreement that this is important," says Ray Noonan, a sexologist from New York City, who wrote his dissertation on sex in space. Don't I know it!