Can’t speak for Marshall, but I’ve seen (and had several conversations with the people who work at) what I assume to be basically the same setup at the Johnson Space Center, where it’s known as the Neutral Bouyancy Laboratory.
The average person will float to the surface of a pool. This is positive bouyancy.
If you put so much weight on them that they sink to the bottom (at any speed), that is negative bouyancy.
If you adjust the weight just right, you get them to the point where they neither rise nor sink: neutral bouyancy.
The pool at Johnson is HUGE. Astronoauts get into it in full gear plus weights with full sized mock-ups of satellites and shuttles to practice and perfect whatever spacewalking they must do before they actaully blast off. The whole pool is riddled with cameras so they can be observed from every possible angle, for operations and safety issues.
If people were interested in “experimenting” with the pool under simulated weightless conditions without a spacesuit on, they’d need scuba gear and an enormous amount of weight strapped to their presumably scantily clad bodies. Obviously there are many obstacles to finding out what zero-g copulation would really be like under these circumstances. Plus you’d need enough for three people if everything went as you described.
OTOH, has anyone there been less interested in zero-g research so much as just wanting to screw in the world’s biggest pool without all the apparatus? My sources never brought up the subject. You’d have to make sure no one was guarding the place or manning the control room for the numerous cameras (unless you were into that kind of thing; of course the pictures would have been all over the web by now).
Loach’s point is well-taken, the business about the mating habits of dolphins could be the product of a fevered imagination of a mind that had no idea what it was talking about
… but the same could be said about the whole NASA story as well.
Whole thing sounds like crap to me.
Neil Armstrong: “That’s one small thrust for man…” 