Sex, Gender, and Deep Space
Sex, Gender, and Deep Space: Lessons from Earthly Anxieties Reproduced Past 100 Kilometers
(Or, Who Gets to Take Up Space?)
By Jonathan M. Galka
At the end of May, SpaceX launched its first manned mission into orbit. Colonels Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, longtime friends from the same astronaut class, will spend between one and four months in Space. Their wives, also both Space-faring astronauts from the same NASA class, along with the other men and women slated for coming launches, watched them enter orbit from back on Earth. Their sons watched too. Though for now the astronauts’ space-faring partners and their children remain Earthbound, it may soon be the case as manned missions travel further afield and for longer durations that humans will seek to multiply away from Earth. And yet the question remains: How will humans reproduce in space?
Once the province of science fiction, human colonization of space--and the need to address the gendered/sexed questions sure to come with extraterrestrial life--is moving rapidly from “if” to “when.” Government space agencies in the United States, the United Arab Emirates, China and Russia have ambitions for deep-space travel and occupation, Mars settlement, and a manned moon base. Beyond states, private companies, from Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origins, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, to smaller companies, eccentric billionaires, and startups are building human and cargo transport infrastructures to the Moon and Mars. As yet, however, no space entrepreneur has taken on the sustainability—or, in this case, reproducibility—of human life beyond the 100-kilometer altitude. If humans are to live away from Earth, how will they reproduce themselves?
In October, the journal Nature Reviews Endocrinology published the first-ever review paper concerning the likely obstacles of human space reproduction. Its authors, reproductive nutrition scientist Birendra Mishra and reproductive toxicologist Ulrike Luderer, consider the potential hazards of space for men’s and women’s reproductive function. Space travelers who aim to procreate will have to deal with complex radiation from galactic cosmic rays and solar particle events, physiological pressures wrought by hypergravity upon atmospheric exit and reentry, and sustained microgravity while in outer space.
“Who gets imagined as a rightful future inhabitant of Space?”
But what evidence do they (and don’t they) consider? What forms of reproduction show up on their radar? And what does the state of the data tell us about who, according to governments and research establishments, gets imagined as a rightful future inhabitant of Space?
Two facets of Mishra and Luderer’s paper leap out. First, the data behind the claim that reproduction in Space is dangerous are thin, but they’re treated as conclusive, particularly for females. Second, some forms of evidence are conspicuously missing. This selective evaluation of data doesn’t look random. It points to an impasse in reproductive biological Space science, a roadblock resulting from a long-standing, problematic relationship between Space organizations like NASA and questions of sex and gender.
Let’s tackle the problem of patchy and inconclusive data. While Mishra and Luderer are interested in the potential for humans to live and reproduce away from Earth, most of the studies they review feature reproductive outcomes of non-human vertebrates. For example, medaka fish, the first vertebrates to reproduce successfully for multiple generations in Space, produced normally fertile offspring. The case for rodents is less clear.
Rats mated aboard an unmanned biosatellite showed signs of early aborted and reabsorbed pregnancies, while pregnancy in other rat groups on other Space flights showed normal litter sizes, some change in birth weights, and an increase in perinatal mortality. Irradiation of female mice with doses of high-energy particles comparable to those expected of a 3-year mission to Mars induced levels of oxidative stress that caused DNA-damage, ovarian follicular cell death, and early ovarian failure.
““We need bigger and better studies, and human studies.” ”
Meanwhile, in males, spermatogonial stem cells appear relatively radioresistant compared to differentiated sperm cells, leading researchers to suggest that a means to germ cell survival and recovery for male gametes through stem cell resilience provides. But not all is well for males. Mice exposed to microgravity (gravity weaker than that on Earth’s surface) showed seminiferous tubule degeneration and decreased sperm counts, whereas rats subjected to microgravity did not. It’s hard to compare studies, though, since some controlled for temperature effects on sperm production, whereas others did not.
Two astronauts at the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) examine mice in the Animal Laboratory which have been inoculated with lunar sample material. (Image Credit: NASA)
Research concerning space reproduction in vertebrate animal models, it turns out, tells us little except that usually, according to reproductive endocrinologist James Nodler, “either things don’t work at all or they’re not as good.” Going forward, according to James Nodler, and echoed by others, “we need bigger and better studies, and human studies.”
Bigger and better studies have in fact been proposed. In 2016, NASA engineers presented a mission concept for a multi-generational, quasi-self sustaining mouse habitat (MICEHAB) aimed at understanding mammalian space reproduction. The project shows no signs of being funded, however, and understanding reproduction appears to remain low on the list of research priorities for institutions like NASA, despite NASA’s ambition to colonize Mars. Researchers have also proposed attempting in vitro fertilization on the International Space Station (ISS), or attempting a live birth with eggs and sperm left frozen on the ISS for a period of time before being returned to Earth. That both of these proposals might put at risk potentially viable embryos, however, ignites old and familiar ethical quandaries.
But we don’t have to turn to research that concerns gametes or embryos to research human reproduction’s relationship to the environment of Space. This brings us to the question of missing evidence, some of which has been walking among us for years.
Why, after decades of astronauts voyaging into space and back, did Mishra and Luderer have so little research to review on humans? Part of the answer is that being a professional astronaut carries different burdens for men and women concerned about their future reproductive potential. In 2014, NASA began granting both astronaut men and women the opportunity to freeze germ cells before spaceflight. But, this process for men versus women looks wildly different. Sperm cryopreservation is relatively quick and straightforward, whereas freezing eggs entails lengthy hormonal courses and invasive surgery. By consequence, astronaut women already battling the odds to be included on mission crews almost never engage these services.
There’s a similar asymmetry after space travel: for male astronauts, reproducing once back on Earth is relatively uncomplicated by the demands of spaceflight training, since even if semen cannot be cryopreserved before a prolonged mission in Space, men only need wait the 74 days required for a full cycle of spermatogenesis to reproduce. For women, pregnancy is contraindicated for many pre-flight training activities and can disrupt training and mission selection, and the period of time between initiating the candidate selection process and completing a short-term spaceflight mission can total eleven years during which time astronaut women may need to engage hormonal contraception.
More than the sex-specific mechanics of reproduction and the usual problems women face in the workplace are at play, though. Space travel as a discipline and industry has a fraught relationship to sex and gender that contributes to the information vacuum. Only about 11% of astronauts are female. Female astronauts almost always use menstruation-suppressing hormones of some kind while in Space, because while the physiology of menstruation functions similarly in microgravity, waste disposal systems aboard the ISS are ill-equipped to handle menstrual blood and maintaining personal hygiene is difficult. As a result, measuring reproductive endpoints upon return and understanding differences in birth outcomes for astronaut females versus the general population has been all but impossible. For men, meanwhile, sperm appears to never have been tested for differences compared to controls. This is true even though hundreds of men have been to space, and information has been collected in at least two instances regarding hormonal changes (in testosterone and luteinizing hormone) in astronauts from blood, urine, and serum. Though a 1987 study suggested that spaceflight affects the sex ratio of male astronaut progeny, virtually no other data have been collected about how the space environment might affect reproduction.
“According to NASA, sex did not and would not happen in space. ”
NASA’s reluctance to engage with gender and sex in space has been clear since the beginning of manned spaceflight. After the 1961-63 Mercury Missions, the magazine Ms. exposed NASA’s approach to crewing the flights that systematically excluded competent female astronauts, throwing NASA into the civil rights spotlight. In the early 1990s, when the first married couple flew to space together while hiding their marriage from NASA until the eleventh hour, NASA made its official position on the matter of sex clear: it did not and would not happen in space.
When Sally Ride became the first American woman in space in 1983, she was bombarded with questions centering on her sex. What happens when you menstruate in Space? Will spaceflight affect your reproductive organs? Do you cry when you experience malfunctions in the simulator? Ride maintained that NASA was supportive through the ordeal. At the same time, she concealed her queer sexuality from NASA and the wider public until her passing in 2012. Only then did her partner of 27 years, with Ride’s blessing, reveal the information. It has been reported that in 1990, years after Ride’s historic flight, NASA quietly sought (and failed) to direct a working group of physicians to declare homosexuality a “psychiatrically disqualifying condition.”
The positions NASA expresses on sex and gender are deeply embedded in the US military, from which NASA borrows its organizational ideology. Attitudes and practices that denigrate or ignore women and non-binary people have harmed the US military. In the same way, relying on thin or missing data--and on the limited imaginative terrain of heteronormative heterosexual reproduction--does harm at a level beyond limiting our potential to understand human sexual reproduction in Space. It shuts down important and generative questions that take us beyond familiar, earthly forms of reproduction and relationship.
A variety of social scientific disciplines, science fiction (from which Space science has often drawn), and indeed biology itself, present us with alternative forms of reproduction and kinship that might differently inform how people relate to one another, both on Earth and beyond. However, assuming we’re very far from overcoming the sperm and egg mode of reproduction, let’s begin with addressing the issue of humans making human babies in Space. Ectogenesis, the growth and development of an organism in an artificial environment, has been proposed to this end. Technologies of ectogenesis, including artificial uteri that allow for extracorporeal pregnancy, have been in development since the 1950s. In 2011, scientists found that novel and emerging technologies of computer-regulated organ systems and artificial uterus and endometrium models had opened up the field for considering human ectogenesis. Indeed, by 2017 fetal surgeon Alan Flake incubated fetal lambs in artificial wombs in a warm, dark room while playing the sound of a mother’s heartbeat, showing that premature lambs could be grown extracorporeally and develop normally for up to four weeks.
“Relying on the limited imaginative terrain of heteronormative heterosexual reproduction shuts down important and generative questions that take us beyond familiar, earthly forms of reproduction and relationship. ”
Given scientific development around artificial uteri, not to mention the extraordinary development and diversification of tissue engineering technologies, the idea of sending embryos into deep space or onto other planets to be grown later might now seem more tenable. Proposals for embryo space colonization most straightforwardly involve sending cryo-preserved embryos, or even sperm and eggs on deep space missions, to be grown in artificial uteri far away from Earth. To date, though, human embryos have only been grown in artificial uteri for thirteen days. Science around human ectogenesis needs further thought, and technology needs developing.
And what about other possible human futures? Biological sciences show that across taxonomies and at all physical scales, cooperation between and among organisms is the status quo. Life lives symbiotically. Bacteria and fungus on and in us shift as we move through space and time, sometimes antagonizing our bodies in the process, but mostly acting in concert with our own physiologies in myriad ways. Indeed, a limitation to normal human development from cryo-preserved embryos would be the absence of our symbiotic microbiological partners, usually donated from our parents and physical environments, that help mediate bodily systems from digestion to immunity. The issue of caring for the nonhuman others we carry with us would be unavoidable in the pursuit of human Space ectogenesis. It is worth then, in thinking about reproducing humans, seriously considering our relationships with all of the nonhumans that have always already made us hybrid creatures, and then going even further.
Historian of science and feminist thinker Donna Haraway, in her 2016 Camille Stories published in Staying with the Trouble, chronicles a multi-generational narrative of a Community of Compost living in the ruins of ecological crisis. The Children of Compost are tasked with caring for particular vanishing nonhuman species in a time of mass extinction, and as such are genetically edited in utero and physiologically adjusted after birth so as to express phenotypes unique to their bonded species. Camille 1, bonded with Monarch butterflies, receives donor gene sequences coding for aspects of tactility, coloration, and olfaction. Future Camilles become evermore inextricably bonded with the complex life cycles of Monarchs. Our own genomes began absorbing fragments of pathogen genomes before CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technologies were ever a blip on the imaginative horizon. Why not explore editing into our ontogenesis genes or gene products from radiation-resistant bacterial or fungal extremophile organisms for example, so as to protect developing human embryos from the inevitable DNA damage from cosmic rays and particles? Such horizons, however, are not part of the range of imagined possibilities considered by endocrinologists and NASA scientists.
Humans presently alter our bodies to enter Space, and are further transformed physiologically all the way down to the cellular level by spaceflight itself. Producing humans in space might require even further alterations to familiar physiology and development. Why can’t we think about our relationships as malleable too while we’re at it, with ample room in their conception for many kinds of kin beyond the biogenetic variety? When confronted with the reality of our social and biological relations, the relative importance of conventional biogenetic kinship becomes minimized. We would be well served to cultivate a more capacious imagination, translated into more inventive research agendas and practices, seeking to understand reproduction and relationality beyond Earth.
We have what we need to get to work on this. The available evidence suggests that expanding our view of what human reproduction could look like beyond Earth is a readily attainable goal. It is neither a limitation of examples from which to draw in nature, both imaginatively and materially nor is it one of the scientific capabilities needed to develop relevant technologies. Rather, we are constrained by normative moral assumptions about what human reproduction should look like and who should be able to participate. Resting upon tired social norms wrapped up in familiar bioethical language will do us little good. If reproducing our species beyond Earth is a problem we want to tackle, then it’s time to get over ourselves and take necessary ethical leaps, alongside scientific, technological, and conceptual ones.
Returning to the space colonization dreams of nations and billionaires around the world, the long and the short of it is, we really don’t know if humans can reproduce in space. And this lack of knowledge should be understood in the context of how institutional space science has had a fraught history with sex and gender, which has translated into a paucity of reliable data on the realities of vertebrate reproduction in the Space environment. Given the massive push from multiple angles to get humans beyond Earth, into long-term space travel, and onto other planets, what Mishra and Luderer underscore is how limited our frame of reproductive and relational imagination has been, how readily systemic anxieties centering sex and gender are translated beyond our planet, and ultimately how little we truly know.
Recommended Citation:
Galka, J. “Sex, Gender, and Deep Space: Lessons from Earthly Anxieties Reproduced Past 100 Kilometers (Or, Who Gets to Take Up Space?)” GenderSci Blog, August, 25, 2020. genderscilab.org/blog/sex-gender-and-deep-space
Statement of Intellectual Labor:
Jonathan Galka authored this piece and all views expressed are his. Meredith Reiches helped in conceiving the direction of the piece and with substantive edits in earlier drafts. Heather Shattuck-Heidorn and Sarah Richardson contributed edits to earlier drafts.