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Shaka, when the walls fell. (crazypeople.online)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/memes@lemmy.world
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NASA, with the tampons.

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[–] 165 points 1 year ago (30 children)

NASA once asked astronaut Sally Ride if 100 tampons would be enough for her week-long mission in space, but she later clarified that this number was excessive. While the engineers were concerned about potential needs, Ride humorously noted that a much smaller amount would suffice.

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  • [–] 104 points 1 year ago (16 children)

    Tbh, this is not quite as dumb as it sounds. Tampons weigh nothing and if there's no way to resupply, it's not quite as dumb to take more than you need. What if, for example, there's a series defect on these things and a large portion of them are defective?

    In fact, when they asked her said it's excessive, to which they told her they wanted to be on the safe side, so she said to cut it in half and bring 50pcs (which is still excessive for most periods, but on the safe side).

    In fact, in the same mission they also brought jelly beans, which were entirely irrelevant to the mission, because Reagan insisted on his favourite snack to go to orbit. They were likely heavier than 100 tampons and also much less necessary up there.

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  • [–] 59 points 1 year ago (12 children)

    I get the impression they were also preparing for a potential freak discovery where it turns out zero G has an extreme effect on the menstrual cycle, and they suddenly need a lot of them.

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  • [–] 49 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    If you have a sample size of 0 and a backup plan of "crash and burn", it does make sense to be extra careful with the preparation.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    I prefer my backup plans to include "halt and catch fire"

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    "halt" might be difficult in orbit.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    How long could the shuttle stay up there if it was deemed unsafe to return?

    They might have been preparing to orbit for long enough to launch a rescue mission.

    100 is probably still to many. I’m suprized they didn’t just buy a box of them, or ask the manufacturers, who surely have the most data on average tampon consumption.

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  • [–] 38 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Why ask the manufacturer about the average consumption when you can ask the person in question about the real consumption?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Tbh, the story was reported by Ride on a talk show for laughs. It's not exactly a well-documented incidence.

    Likely, the package they ordered had 100pcs in them (because it's meant for commercial clients) and they asked her something like "We got 100 here, how many do you need?"

    It's of course fun to insinuate that NASA engineers have never been close to women and thus have no idea how tampons work, but it's more likely that this was just played up for laughs at a talk show.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    Yeah it’s a lot like the Russian pencil/ vs space pen meme at this point. (Spoiler, Russia ended up using space pens from Fischer too)

    I dislike the engineers have no common sense trope, as it’s another instance of sowing distrust in experts that’s been going on since the late 70s.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago*

    Yeah, the story of the space pen is also completely wrong, because Fisher mostly created the space pen for marketing reasons. They didn't create the pen and then end the story there. No, they created the pen because they could sell it to the non-space-faring public, and it was a huge success.

    They are still selling it today, 59 years after its invention in 1966.

    And the development of the space pen didn't take years and didn't cost millions. In fact, NASA only paid a total of $2400 for 400pcs of them. And the main reason they even tasked Fisher with making these was that they were cheaper than the mechanical pencils they first wanted to buy.

    I dislike the engineers have no common sense trope, as it’s another instance of sowing distrust in experts that’s been going on since the late 70s.

    Absolute agreement.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (10 children)

    Still a pretty dumb approach by the NASA guys. Didn't it occur to them to ask a woman - any woman - before coming up with the initial estimate? Like "hey Sally, how many tampons do you normally need during your period? OK we'll triple that for a safety margin." There. Done.

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  • [–] 22 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    They did ask her. Sure, they could have asked how many instead, but it probably came in a 100 count well within any significant mass margins, so they just asked if 100 would be enough.

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  • [+] -6 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    it probably came in a 100 count

    A 100-count box seems like an absurdly large unit size. Are you doing the very thing that the anecdote is intended to highlight?

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Procurement for business/government/military (including and especially NASA), is very different than what you would see on a shelf at your local drug store.

    The drug store can't buy a single box of tampons. They have to get an entire case of boxes of tampons. If each box is say, 20 tampons, and there's more than 5 of those per case, then they're buying at least 100 tampons so they can get a single box of them.

    There's a lot of alternatives they could have looked into, like neighboring government institutions which may already stock them, asking them to supply a smaller quantity than they would have needed to order, or ordering outside of their typical channels and sending the intern down the road to buy a box from the nearest pharmacy... Those things wouldn't really get accounted for in their budgeting though... So they would prefer to order through their normal distribution.

    It's a funny comment to make to Ride, "is 100 enough?" And I'm sure everyone had a good chuckle.

    Regardless they probably didn't see another good option for ordering other than to just buy a case of them and figure out the rest later.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Don't agencies have some kind of de minimis threshold for just running out to the store and buying basic stuff? I thought that's why the DOGE freeze of government credit cards a few months ago was causing labs to cancel experiments and employees paying out of pocket to feed horses and working dogs.

    So the military does have a strict procurement process for rocket fuel, but they generally refuel their civilian vehicles (vans and such) with a government credit card at normal gas stations.

    At least that's how I understand it.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    It depends. What area is the vehicle operating in, what resources are available in the area, both from internal department, intra department, and external/public....

    There's a lot of factors to consider.

    I won't pretend to know what factors got them to that point, but bluntly, it doesn't really matter. Some set of circumstances created the conditions where such a question needed to be asked.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    This is for stuff going on a literal space ship. I'm sure procurement was super strict on there.

    Imagine getting some defective stuff (or even worse, stuff contaminated with bacteria or something like that).

    I don't think they'd just let some intern tun over to the local walmart and grab supplies from there for supplies for the space shuttle.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I suspect the strictness isn't with the procurement process where a contracting officer defines very specific criteria in compliance with acquisition regulations and submits the process to competitive bids. The strictness is in the mission parameters where NASA's ownership of the thing has already been established, but the NASA employees in a strict hierarchical decisionmaking process need to justify why a thing that NASA already owns should be included in the packing list on a mission.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    In the end, same result. I guess it would be much harder to get a pack of stuff from Walmart onto a mission than something from a certified supplier who has a datasheet and certifications for the item. And having to order 100pcs of a very cheap product even though less would have sufficed isn't a good reason to instead have to certify tampons of unknown origin manually.

    Just launching the space shuttle costed $24mio per flight (in 1977 money), so saving a dollar or two by buying fewer tampons was clearly not a priority.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago*

    On NASA defence is not the first time that due problems with vehicles an astronaut have to stay up there for much much much longer than their planed stance.

    At the end I think the astronaut said that 50 would be enough. So the NASA estimate wasn't really that far off. As it's totally normal for a woman to use half or double the tampons than other woman during period.

    But it is a funny story indeed.

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