Sex in space. Or not

Now here's a funny story. Very nearly eight years ago, in February 2000, when I was the Guardian's correspondent in Paris, I wrote a mildly humorous news item for the foreign pages about a fairly well-known French science, space and astronomy writer called Pierre Kohler who claimed, in a book that had been published that week, that both US and Russian astronauts had enjoyed "cosmic couplings" during separate doubtless important research programmes into how humans might survive several years in orbit.