I stole this from a memes instance for you guys.
The reference, for those who don't get it
this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2025
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If you use order-of-magnitude rounding, 100 is the right number, depending on which two weeks you pick.
Plus with it being NASA you kinda have to grossly overestimate things like this. If they plan on being in space for 14 days you don't necessarily limit it to the average person's 14 days worth of health items. Anything could go wrong
How many tampons do you think an average woman needs for one period? Keep in mind as well, that the cost for cargo on the Space Shuttle was $14,186 per kilogram ($6,435 per pound) in 2010 dollars or $21,016 per kilogram ($9,533) today.
I'm not suggesting they haul up extra cargo containers worth of stuff and payload does have to be carefully calculated.
100 tampons would be close to $5,000 to haul up there, and I bet they would have taken that out of her budget for personal effects. It would be like taking enough toothpaste for 5 months. There's a difference between an abundance of caution and plain old excess.
Edit: I should add, that's the weight/cost for applicator-less tampons. I could absolutely see the argument that applicators would be even more useful in a zero-g environment. They would probably be around 10g total at that point, or even more, so that would push the total weight to a full kilo or more.
It would be like taking enough toothpaste for 5 months
so like one standard tube instead of a tiny travel tube?
Yeah and if they were stranded for months like a recent crew wouldnt it be better to be on the side of excess instead? Granted 100 is still excessive none the less but now they have them there for a while for other women on missions no? And due to inflation it would have only been more expensive to send more at a later time right so in this mentality it makes sense to me.
The Center of Science and Industry (COSI) in Colombus OH has a little mock-up of the space station you can walk through that shows all the different tools and stations and whatnot, and there's a hygeine station that has a familiar reference . I audibly giggled when I saw it.
Cut them some slack, they're engineers. They are not used to temporarily plug up leaky systems, but to fix them.
And beyond that, they are engineers. What do they know about women?
Cut them some slack, they’re engineers... And beyond that, they are engineers
Excellent point
What do they know about women?
Most definitely a fembot
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.
this is brilliant, I'm slain