In February 2013, Dennis Tito's Inspiration Mars Foundation announced that they were going to send a two-person crew – a man and a woman – on a 501-day, free-return, flyby mission to Mars and back.[citation needed] Jane Poynter stressed the importance of the pre-existing stable emotional bond between the members of the couple. She cited her own experience as being a Biosphere 2 crew member together with her husband Taber MacCallum, who is the chief technology officer of Inspiration Mars.
In June 2015, Pornhub announced its plans to make the first pornographic film in space. It launched a crowdfunding campaign to fund the effort, dubbed Sexploration, with the goal of raising $3.4 million in 60 days. The campaign only received pledges for $236 086. If funded, the film would have been slated for a 2016 release, following six months of training for the two performers and six-person crew.[21][22][23][24] Though it claimed to be in talks with multiple private spaceflight carriers, the company declined to name names "for fear that that would risk unnecessary fallout" from the carriers.[21] A Space.com article about the campaign mentioned that in 2008, Virgin Galactic received and rejected a $1 million offer from an undisclosed party to shoot a sex film on board SpaceShipTwo.[22]
Short of actual space, the adult entertainment production company Private Media Group has filmed a movie called The Uranus Experiment: Part Two where an actual zero-gravity intercourse scene was accomplished by flying an airplane to an altitude of 11,000 feet (3350 meters) and then doing a steep dive. The filming process was particularly difficult from a technical and logistical standpoint. Budget constraints allowed for only one 20-second shot, featuring the actors Sylvia Saint and Nick Lang.[25] Berth Milton, Jr, president and CEO of Private Media Group, says "You would not want to be afraid of flying, that's for sure!"[26]
