The joke is pretty funny but, in fairness, we didn’t know what would happen to women up in space.
As far as the team knew, the bladder would get a little loose for men but menstruation for women could mean them having a high enough flow to result in blood loss and get into every device on board. No long term zero gravity experiment had been performed up to that point with women and the engineers wanted to be extra sure that it didn’t end up in serious injury.
Or I could be pulling this out of my ass, who knows?
NASA is a very safety conscious organization. So they want to overestimate everything and include way more than they need. So when she said a couple per day you can round that to 5 for safety, then considering it’s a 6 day mission they want to include triple the amount of needed supplies which means 18 days worth. 18*5=90 which is pretty close to 100 so let’s round up again. Plus tampons are a useful first aid tool, especially in zero gravity. You shove some into an open wound and it’ll prevent blood from spilling all over the very sensitive equipment. Does a woman need 100 tampons for 6 days? Of course not, but she wasn’t going to spend a week in the mountains, she was going to space, so the safety precautions were much more stringent
i’m cis amab (though i have some unusual anatomy) and i’ve used about 10 tampons for myself for first aid in the last 20 years. if i had normal anatomy, i’d’ve probably used one for a nosebleed. but like, they are useful for more than menstruation.
also, i’m thinking about the crew that got stranded at the space station. say for some reason her trip lasted a fuckton longer than it was supposed to. she’d be glad she had 100.
The joke is pretty funny but, in fairness, we didn’t know what would happen to women up in space.
As far as the team knew, the bladder would get a little loose for men but menstruation for women could mean them having a high enough flow to result in blood loss and get into every device on board. No long term zero gravity experiment had been performed up to that point with women and the engineers wanted to be extra sure that it didn’t end up in serious injury.
Or I could be pulling this out of my ass, who knows?
Reposting one of my top lemmy comments:
NASA is a very safety conscious organization. So they want to overestimate everything and include way more than they need. So when she said a couple per day you can round that to 5 for safety, then considering it’s a 6 day mission they want to include triple the amount of needed supplies which means 18 days worth. 18*5=90 which is pretty close to 100 so let’s round up again. Plus tampons are a useful first aid tool, especially in zero gravity. You shove some into an open wound and it’ll prevent blood from spilling all over the very sensitive equipment. Does a woman need 100 tampons for 6 days? Of course not, but she wasn’t going to spend a week in the mountains, she was going to space, so the safety precautions were much more stringent
i’m cis amab (though i have some unusual anatomy) and i’ve used about 10 tampons for myself for first aid in the last 20 years. if i had normal anatomy, i’d’ve probably used one for a nosebleed. but like, they are useful for more than menstruation.
also, i’m thinking about the crew that got stranded at the space station. say for some reason her trip lasted a fuckton longer than it was supposed to. she’d be glad she had 100.
Better to be over prepared rather than unprepared. NASA engineers did not play the fuck around find out game.
Idk, that’s sounding a lot like they were just exceptionally prepared to find out.