There is a list article somewhere (I know, the internet is full of them) of actual stupid questions. One of them is that NASA asked Sally Ride if 100 tampons would be enough for a 7 day mission. Now, I know she was the first female astronaut, but surely she wasn’t the first female ever to work at NASA.
Please tell me this is one of those internet legends.
Per this interview, apparently they did.
To be fair, as a male…as a male that grew up with a mom and two sisters then had a female roommate through college and lived with a girlfriend and (now ex) wife for 8 years after college I wouldn’t know that 100 is too many. Keeping in mind if you guess the wrong number there’s no running to Walmart at 3am.
I can honestly say I have no idea at all how many tampons a woman goes through while on her period. Sure, I could guess it’s less than a hundred, but again, 200 miles above Earth isn’t the place to run out.
The makeup thing is funny though. Wonder if they asked her if she needed a cocktail dress and a vacuum too.
And a pearl necklace like June Cleaver.
:dubious:
What? No she was not. The first wasValentina Tereshkova and they second was Svetlana Savitskaya.
Exactly, and how can she be so confident that her body would behave in the same manner in a place completely foreign to her and her ancestry?
Yeah, to be fair, I wouldn’t know either, and I’m married five years (together ten) and have lived with women a good portion of my life. I would guess maybe 3-5 per period day, but I have no actual idea based on empirical observation. 100 does seem like complete overkill to me, but better to ask than be sorry.
I read that interview to Mrs. SMV, and she laughed. But then she said, “On the other hand, I don’t know what effect zero gravity would have on it. So maybe they might need more.” And then pointed out that astronauts might find absorbent cotton useful for other, non-menstrual tasks.
Then again, they could have simply asked Ride if she was going to need tampons at all on a seven-day mission. Unless the NASA engineers thought that women menstruate continously?
I read somewhere that as Svetlana Savitskaya was returning from her spaceflight, the guys at Russian Control told her, “We have an apron all ready for you, Svetlana.”
Sigh. Which is worse, aprons or tampons?
What if you’re like me, and you prefer pads?
How much make-up would an all female crew need on a Mars mission?
Cosmonauts. 
I once saw a documentary about women in the military; one of the subjects was an a retired US Marine who described having to take makeup application lessons during boot camp.
Those women were cosmonauts; Sally Ride is the first female astronaut.
The lack of gravity would have made executing a pearl necklace rather troublesome.
I think most consumables were pre-loaded into the shuttles weeks in advance. Given that a mission planned to lift off on the 9th could easily be delayed until the 22nd of the following month, it was probably a good idea to pre-load N tampons per female crewmember.
I don’t know if it was a real question or not but it isn’t a dumb one even if it was asked. I have lived with women all my life and I have no idea how many a typical woman goes through in a given period. 100 is obviously way too high but it is better to lean to the side of caution because a whole box of them weighs next to nothing and doesn’t take up much space.
Tampons are also useful in case you need to soak up and dispose of almost any fluid or even use them as first aid tools to stop bleeding. The engineers have to cover almost all worst case scenarios. What if there is some type of hemorrhaging or being stuck in space for much longer than planned? They weren’t being sexist. It is the exact opposite. They are asking for a female opinion on something she would know much more about than they do.
Depends.
Do they double as emergency rations?
Anyway, NASA was being cautious and conservative. You don’t want to have to Apollo 13 something to fit in a hole it wasn’t designed for when it comes to this stuff, after all. A hundred tampons is a small amount of extra mass which could prevent a large amount of extra suffering.
Actually, it was after arriving at the Salyut, when the Cosmonaut in command gave her a floral apron and told her to get to work…cooking.
This was obviously a joke, but Western propaganda at the time took it seriously.
Incidentally, before Savitskaya’s flight, the Soviet authorities were a bit worried about what sending a woman up there would do to the crew dynamics. The Sovs had started doing long duration spaceflights and had discovered that crew developed phycological issues, more than one mission had to be ended early because they were worried that the cosmonauts might kill one another/were having hallucinations.
Which apparently was the reason for the rather “jovial” atmosphere being encouraged and the segregation, IIRC she was told to sleep in the Soyuz as opposed to the station itself.
Do women even need them in zero-G?
There really weren’t ANY women working at NASA at the time? I like how all the guys here answered the same way: Well, I don’t know how many tampons a woman would need. Stands to reason no one at NASA would.
Well, it’s not rocket science.