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.
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.
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.
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.
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.