What man wouldn't desire to be marooned on a planet of sex-starved alien women? Science-fiction depictions of attractive female aliens waiting in the wings for Earth-born, virile male astronauts to teach them the ABC's of intergalactic love-making has been the stuff of science fiction "fantasy" for more than four decades. One need only look to popular television shows of the era like: Star Trek, Space 1999, Battlestar Gallatica, Farscape, Lexx, Firefly, and Andromeda to understand that some of the hottest girls on Earth were not actually from Earth at all. Most of these Venus goddesses appeared scantily clad and eagerly embraced the whole cosmic notion of human contact.

In the popular science fiction show, Cleopatra 2525, for example, an exotic dancer is cryogenically frozen in the year 2001 and is accidentally thawed out in the year 2525 by two female space warriors who enlist her help in repelling an army of evil robots from taking over the universe.

Sexy women were always depicted in the pulp cover art of popular science fiction novels of the forties and fifties but the idea of the so-called "space babe" may owe it's origin to the sexual revolution of the 1960's and the 1970's. Sex in early sci-fi literature, though sometimes casually implied, was rarely the topic of discussion in most early science fiction novels from the 1930's, 1940's and the 1950's.

Following the Soviet Union's historic launch of the world's first man-made satellite (Sputnik 1) on October 4, 1957, the attention of the United States turned toward its own fledgling space efforts. The U.S. Congress, alarmed by the perceived threat to national security and technological leadership (known as "Sputnik Shock"), urged immediate and swift action. President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his advisors counseled more deliberate measures. Several months of debate produced an agreement that a new federal agency was needed to conduct all non-military activitivies in space. Finally on July 29, 1958, President Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act establishing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Little did anyone know that the U.S. space program of the late 1950's and 1960's was on a direct collision course with some of the most sweeping social changes in modern history. The sexual revolution of the 1960's and the New Wave movement in science fiction would bring the candor of human sexuality to the forefront of modern science fiction literature and cinema and have a major impact on the fledgling U.S. space program.

click arrows to continue