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Sins’ would-be co-pilot was equally enthused.

“Who else can say that they were the first porn stars to work in space?” Eva Lovia said. “This is an amazing opportunity to make history and to work two dream jobs at once: porn star and astronaut.”

While Lovia and, ahem, Sins might make unlikely pioneers, talk of Martian colonies and extraterrestrial emigration must include an understanding of what doing the nasty is like off of planet Earth. If humankind must flee Earth because of a resource crisis or asteroid impact, sex will be required for the species to survive. (Absent in vitro fertilization or other sex-free “Interstellar”-style scenarios, of course.)

Even physics superstar Stephen Hawking said sex in space was important — in a roundabout way.

“I believe that the long-term future of the human race must be in space,” Hawking said in 2010. “It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn’t have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let’s hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load.”

YouPorn, Tube8, and Pornhub — they’re all vast, vast sites that dwarf almost everything except the Googles and Facebooks of the Internet

Whether Lovia and Sins would really be the first to copulate in orbit remains an open question. NASA and Russia’s space agency have denied that astronauts rounded the bases — but, for the record, at least one married couple has gone to space together, and other astronauts have been accused of flirting.

“If astronauts have had space sex, it would have been very difficult,” Slate concluded in an examination of the topic in 2007. Not only does space offer limited privacy and a very busy schedule, but the physics could present a physical problem.

“Zero gravity can induce nausea — a less-than-promising sign for would-be lovers,” Christopher Beam wrote. “Astronauts also perspire a lot in flight, meaning sex without gravity would likely be hot, wet, and surrounded by small droplets of sweat. In addition, people normally experience lower blood pressure in space, which means reduced blood flow, which means … well, you know what that means.”

That PornHub would hope to become a player in a field dominated by state governments and billionaires such as Elon Musk speaks volumes about the size of the adult industry. While PornHub is privately held and its valuation is hard to estimate, it’s said that 30 percent of all data transmitted by the Internet is porn.

“YouPorn, Tube8, and Pornhub — they’re all vast, vast sites that dwarf almost everything except the Googles and Facebooks of the Internet,” ExtremeTech wrote in 2012.

PornHub’s sexploration crowdfunding campaign, however, had yet to show much muscle of press time, raising just $5,000 of its $3.4 million dollar goal. Interested supporters of the campaign take note: A $150,000 donation gets you “one of the 2 spacesuits worn by our sextronauts complete with underwear, plus a swag bag!”

The mostly safe for work pitch trailer for the campaign is embedded below