roach-works:prismatic-bell: ragnarokascendant: talvin-muircastle: signoraviolettavalery:haunted-me
roach-works:prismatic-bell: ragnarokascendant: talvin-muircastle: signoraviolettavalery: haunted-meat: dennator25: So this seems dumb…and it is…but it’s dumb with a purpose. I can almost guarantee you the exact line of reasoning that gets NASA engineers to 100. Ok, first of all assume the worst and assume she needs the max amount of tampons possible for all days. Now lets count it up. 7 days? Better be safe and make it 10. 3 tampons a day at worst? Better be safe and make it 5. So that gives us 50 tampons. Ok. Double it. And that’s how you get 100. It’s ridiculous, but NASA has a culture of “overengineer absolutely everything to do with human safety, and then design around it” which is actually pretty cool. Listen, I know this gets made fun of so much, but likeI am a woman who has periods and I have absolutely no idea how many tampons a woman requires in a week. I use primarily pads. But these men, at the least, ASKED her instead of making unfounded assumptions. Which would you rather be: A. The NASA Director Who Sent Too Many? B. The NASA Director Who Didn’t Send Enough? Let’s be honest this is both in line with NASA practices *and good practice in general*. Redundancy, backups, and extra supplies, always. Especially if you’re yeeting people into the void. There ain’t no fucking convenience stores in space. This is true AND ALSO, they had no idea if, or how, being in space would affect the menstrual cycle, because she was THE FIRST ONE. (In America. Theoretically we could have asked the Russians for that information, but given that the US and Russia were threatening to blow each other off the map on a daily basis at the time, that probably would have involved a giant “fuck off.”) The most egalitarian organization in the world could not have guessed because there’s really no way to get that information until the practical test. Overshooting was absolutely the way to go. can you fucking imagine what it would do to your career if you were the guy in charge of Period Stuff along with the first female astronaut, and so you didn’t send enough, and then she got shot into space and it turns out that zero gravity makes human women turn into some kind of unstoppable blood volcano because maybe vaginas need gravity to function for some reason and she dies of space periods and everyone is like ‘well fuck, let’s blame this on carl for being too stingy with the tampons’. im pretty sure that nasa engineer imagined it. -- source link