For a little under a million dollars a week, lovers can have a padded, furniture-free cabin in the 500-room hotel-to-be. Meyer predicts the weekly price for a "romance room" will drop to $24,000 by 2012. It was Dennis Tito's recent trip to the International Space Station that got Meyer's company revved up.

"At first, the plan was just to open a space hotel," he said. "But our research shows that the real reason couples want to spend a week in space is for fabulous sex."

Speculation about the quality and practicality of extraplanetary sex is nothing new. Since the very beginnings of coed space travel, NASA junkies, conspiracy theorists and general sex enthusiasts have suggested that the deed's already been done. The U.S. and the Soviet Union repeatedly denied conducting secret floating-love experiments, but the skeptics weren't convinced.

In fact, they claimed not only that sex happened, but that it happened lousily. Contrary to Meyer's sales pitch, the absence of gravity supposedly makes for bad sex. Nobody can get any purchase on anybody, the theory goes, and the result is something worth a little less than $143,000 a night.

Judging by the Space Island Group's Web site, this whole sex angle is a new development in the business model. The nonupdated site concerns itself with far drier goals: promoting space commerce, creating new training facilities and establishing a satellite repair and upgrade program.

In light of the new plan, Meyer sounded confident, even a little breathless. "There are millions of couples who want to try it and join the 400-mile-high club," he said.

Private Life Romance, relationships, and the personal side of Table Talk