Sally Ride, first female NASA astronaut to go to space: "I remember the engineers trying to decide how many tampons should fly on a one-week flight; they asked, “Is 100 the right number?”
I mean, the 10 ish day long mission that recently took 9 months happened, actually with a woman on board. If you said “100 is too much lol” and opted for 10, you’d be laughing out the other side of your face when you started having to improvise sanitation supplies after month three.
Except that 9 months took place on a space station. There were regular cargo missions to the station. And they could have been brought back at any nearly any point if necessary. Other astronauts literally went up and came back from the Station in that 9 months.
The timeframe being so long was almost entirely about the Starliner itself and what they were going to do with a known defective and potentially unusable spacecraft, where the only trained pilots were those astronauts, not anything with the astronauts themselves.
If the station wasn’t an option for whatever reason (despite it literally being part of the planned mission), then other contingencies would have been available or at least planned already. This wasn’t an Apollo 13 situation where not making it back was a serious concern.
I guess you’d run out of food before tampons without cargo shipments? Although if they are using error bars for the food, they might want to use simiar error bars for tampons too? 🤷
To be fair, at the time, there was no ISS for the shuttle to dock to, the shuttle pretty much was all they had. It was designed for missions of about 10 days, and could be expanded to about 17 days if needed. If they needed to stretch it up to a month to go beyond that for her to have a second period, I suspect that would rather have used that cargo capacity for some extra food and such and dealt with her free-bleeding, and much beyond that they’d need to come down one way or another or just die in space.
They last 4-8 hours. Most women bleed for 3-7 days. So on the outer edge, you could need 42. I’ve never gone through more than a box of 24 in a cycle. But the US hadn’t put a menstruating person in space before, who knew if being in space would somehow unleash a geyser of mysterious lady fluids never before seen by man.
To condemn NASA a little bit further: NASA engineering also insisted that Sally Ride absolutely had to have a flight makeup kit. They went to the trouble to design one and make sure everything would work in zero-g. It went up and came back down completely unopened.
For those who don’t get the joke:
https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/RideSK/RideSK_10-22-02.htm
I mean, the 10 ish day long mission that recently took 9 months happened, actually with a woman on board. If you said “100 is too much lol” and opted for 10, you’d be laughing out the other side of your face when you started having to improvise sanitation supplies after month three.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Crew_Flight_Test
Except that 9 months took place on a space station. There were regular cargo missions to the station. And they could have been brought back at any nearly any point if necessary. Other astronauts literally went up and came back from the Station in that 9 months.
The timeframe being so long was almost entirely about the Starliner itself and what they were going to do with a known defective and potentially unusable spacecraft, where the only trained pilots were those astronauts, not anything with the astronauts themselves.
If the station wasn’t an option for whatever reason (despite it literally being part of the planned mission), then other contingencies would have been available or at least planned already. This wasn’t an Apollo 13 situation where not making it back was a serious concern.
I guess you’d run out of food before tampons without cargo shipments? Although if they are using error bars for the food, they might want to use simiar error bars for tampons too? 🤷
Yeah but drag would still rather have 100 tampons than no tampons in that situation.
To be fair, at the time, there was no ISS for the shuttle to dock to, the shuttle pretty much was all they had. It was designed for missions of about 10 days, and could be expanded to about 17 days if needed. If they needed to stretch it up to a month to go beyond that for her to have a second period, I suspect that would rather have used that cargo capacity for some extra food and such and dealt with her free-bleeding, and much beyond that they’d need to come down one way or another or just die in space.
♻️ Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. ♻️
Thanks. A little surprised by the current proportion of people that didn’t understood that reference.
It was almost half a century ago
Thanks, I was really hoping for a gut punch right about now
No problem, old timer.
Get off my lawn
To be fair, I have absolutely no idea how many tampons a woman would need either, although 10 per day seems high.
They last 4-8 hours. Most women bleed for 3-7 days. So on the outer edge, you could need 42. I’ve never gone through more than a box of 24 in a cycle. But the US hadn’t put a menstruating person in space before, who knew if being in space would somehow unleash a geyser of mysterious lady fluids never before seen by man.
To condemn NASA a little bit further: NASA engineering also insisted that Sally Ride absolutely had to have a flight makeup kit. They went to the trouble to design one and make sure everything would work in zero-g. It went up and came back down completely unopened.
I mean what do women do besides menstruate and look pretty??
Fetish unlocked…
And in that moment a new kind of propulsion was discovered