Several years ago, some clandestine experiments were conducted late at night in the neutral boyancy weightless simulation tank at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. This huge swimming pool allows astronauts to simulate zero-gravity by working underwater...
...the report came to me in a plain brown telephone call. I was told that, yes, it is indeed possible for humans to copulate in weightlessness. However, they have trouble staying together. The covert researchers discovered that it helps to have a third person to push at the right time in the right place. The researchers--who must remain anonymous lest they get into trouble--discovered that this is the way dolphins do it. A third dolphin is always present during the mating process. Therefore, the space counterpart to the Mile High Club is the Three Dolphin Club.
I wrote a science fact article about this and got a lot of mail, including a report from people who worked for Lockheed at the NASA Kennedy Space Center in Florida. They included a drawing of the membership pin of the Three Dolphin Club, shown here as Figure 24-2. As of 1990, several space shuttle astronauts were qualified to wear this pin because of nonscheduled personal activities aboard the space shuttle on seven flights. I shall protect the names of these pioneers of human expansion into space because I don't want them to lose their astronaut status.
