this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
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Wasn't the 100 tampons thing because they didn't know how weightlessness would affect bleeding?
That and 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
It's also a weight thing. Tampons are pretty light, it's like one hundred per pound, so they probably said "we can budget x pounds for this" and didn't think much about the reasoning behind why they're sending several hundred tampons into space, but we're entirely focused on how.
Less than that I think, and I’d suspect NASA would do load calculations in metric.
According to this reputable (first result on Google) High School Science Fair Project ^PDF, the average tampon is about 1g. I wouldn’t be surprised if they just budgeted 100g for it.
There's also the point that they don't go bad. It might be easier to send a load up now, that try and fit enough for each female astronaut into every flight.