NASA Sent a Woman Astronaut on a 6-Day Space Mission — So They Packed 100 Tampons For Her

Menstruation is a taboo subject in many countries worldwide, a hush-hush topic that people would best avoid speaking about. However, what was not anticipated was the lack of primitive knowledge about human biology by the world’s leading space agency, NASA. The first American woman in space, physicist Sally Ride was shuttled off for a weeklong expedition to outer space in 1983 with a chock-full of tampons, 100 of them, to be precise, reported prominent journalist Ann Friedman in a report for The American Prospect. 

Outlining the social burdens of being the first, Friedman wrote about Ride’s clever reaction to the bizarre number of tampons proposed by the space engineers. They asked the astronaut, “Is 100 the right number?” for seven days in space. “That would not be the right number,” Ride quipped. According to the source, in preparation, the tampons were packed with strings connecting each, “like a strip of sausages” to prevent them from floating away. The male engineers even had a justification ready for Ride’s reaction, saying, “We just want to be safe,” as reported by Vox. Thanks to political progress in that era, NASA also installed commodes in space vessels replacing the previously urine-catching devices specifically designed for male astronauts. 

Hence, Ride onboarded the Space Shuttle Challenger to be launched into space from Launch Pad 39A, with a tampon reserve meant to last nearly three months in contrast to a mere seven-day mission. The sheer ignorance of the rocket scientists about the natural biological cycle in women was off-putting for many others. In 2020, Hollywood star Christa B. Allen brought NASA’s hysterical feat to mainstream attention with a viral video. She lip-synced to a song based on the incident that lit up the internet, throwing shade on the leading space agency that houses some of the greatest minds in the nation. 

Originally, NASA’s tampon exaggeration was popularized by comedian Marcia Belsky in her hit song “100 Tampons,” six years after Ride’s trip to outer space. Honoring her first space mission, which also was a significant achievement for American women, Belsky penned a satirical lyric for NASA that read, “Remember when NASA sent a woman to space for just six days and equipped her with 100 tampons? And they asked, 'Will that be enough?' 'Cause they didn't know if that was enough... These are our nation's greatest minds..."

While one would argue that rocket scientists do not necessarily require such information, it is science after all– a field the “scientists” are meant to master, if not, merely retain information in their supposedly superior IQs. Many decades later, NASA now has 360 astronaut candidates, 61 of whom are women, per NASA. According to Google Arts & Culture, the space organization began recruiting women astronauts for their operations in 1922. 50% of the newest class of astronauts were women in 2017. 

As is little known, women scientists have made significant contributions to NASA’s successful missions over the years, though less recognized in the face of the male-dominated field. For instance, a team of women space engineers, including Katherine Johnson, Margaret Hamilton, JoAnn Morgan, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, per DPMA, were behind the successful Apollo 11 moon landing that made Neil Armstrong the first person to walk on Earth’s natural satellite, the moon. Their underrepresented contributions were brilliantly portrayed in the hit film, Hidden Figures in 2016.