With NASA working toward sending astronauts back to the moon in 2018 and to Mars in the years after that, there are many health and safety issues to consider with long-term space flights — such as sex, a recent report shows.

A trip to Mars would last three years. With a flight of that length, sex and romantic relationships are bound to occur among crew members, and they can be both a stabilizing factor and a mission concern, according to Lawrence Palinkas, a medical anthropologist at the University of Southern California.

Palinkas studied the health effects of working in polar research stations in Antarctica for 20 years, and the psychological and social factors of romantic entanglements among crew members was one of the topics of concern. Usually, the relationships end in the middle of the crew’s year at the research station or at the end, leading to arguments and sometimes a breakdown among crew members, Palinkas said.

“It’s kind of like high school: You break up with somebody and date somebody else, and then there are problems among your friends; only the isolation magnifies it,” Palinkas said in an interview.

Space flights have a similar environment to Antarctic research stations in that crew members are living in very close quarters and have nowhere to escape from each other. According to Palinkas, due to these harsh circumstances, social situations can get explosive.

A recent study by the National Academy of Sciences, which Palinkas co-authored, reviewed NASA’s health and safety plan for long space missions. In addition to discussing the effects of radiation and bone loss in outer space, the report recommended that NASA research sexuality issues.

But sex isn’t just a bad thing for astronauts, it can also relieve tension and help them to cope with the stressful situations that flying in outer space create, Palinkas said. Romantic partnerships can create a sense of stability in the crew, modeling more normal human situations.

In Palinkas’ Antarctic studies, the more women that were present at the station the better the crew fared. Also, sex can relieve boredom and anxiety on long space missions, said Dr. Carol Rinkleib Ellison, a sex and intimacy therapist in Oakland and a graduate of UC Davis.

According to Phillip Shaver, chair of the UC Davis psychology department, due to the relatively short length of past space missions, dyadic sex likely has not yet occurred, and thus the problem of intimate relationships has not presented itself.

However, with longer missions problems with sexual desire, infatuation and intense intimacy becomes more of a problem, he said in an e-mail. According to Ellison, being confined to a spaceship with only six to eight crew members can exacerbate already volatile human emotions when it comes to sex and intimate relationships.

However, everyone differs in how they use sex, she said, with some people who try to be the alpha male or female and using sex as self-validation. This can lead to “love triangles and all sorts of soap opera things,” Ellison said.

Then there are also technical problems with having sex in space, such as weightlessness and close physical monitoring by a station on earth, leaving astronauts with little privacy or alone time, she said.

Safe sex is also an issue, as there would be no resources to deliver a child in space if a woman became pregnant. In an e-mail interview, Shaver said there would need to be strict guidelines on the use of birth control.

Palinkas noted that NASA needs to develop a screening process for astronauts that determines who would cope well with the stresses of space flight and the tensions among crew members. Ellison also suggested that NASA take into consideration the different sexual strategies of potential astronauts, favoring ones with a smaller sex drive, which could prevent some of the potential conflict among crew members.

Also, pre-established astronaut couples or astronauts who agree not to have sex could also solve sexual problems, Shaver said. However, infidelity among couples and astronauts going back on their word could happen as well, he added.

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