...fingers.

(It's Robert behind the pseudonym, BTW).

I understand that discussions of sex in space aren't to everybody's taste, but they're far from offtopic on a Space discussion forum. If we're at all serious about building a spacefaring society, such a society will have to offer the same richness of experience and social interaction as life on Earth.

When I compare images of the interiors of ISS versus Mir, ISS seems a bit like a Potemkin Village when judged as a milestone on the path to a SFC. It's designed to showcase technological prowess, but the interiors seem sterile, like a carefully-dressed set in a science fiction movie. The few personal touches seem as pinched and constrained as office cubicle decorations on Earth, self-consciously aware that the boss is watching and that there are Rules about that sort of thing.

In contrast, there was never any doubt that real people were really living aboard Mir. I was serious when I said that I admire the Russian determination to bring as much of life on Earth aboard Mir as they could. The bottles of booze, the packs of cigarettes, and what might or might not have been paraphernelia...as much as they may horrify the grey bureaucrats at NASA, they represent an attempt to make a real life out in space.

If sex n' drugs n' rock-n-roll are part of life on Earth, they're part of life in space.