“The Nasa guys had realised that women might be women and therefore, while they were flying, it might be the time of the month when they got their periods,” Sullivan told me in an earlier interview.
“They put some tampons in the PPK for Sally to look at and she pulled one out and it was like unreeling a string of sausages. Tampon, tampon, tampon, tampon, tampon. There were like 100. And they said, is that enough? Sally was hysterical and said, ‘No, no’. She thought that was really too much, thank you very much.”
As you may have gathered, Nasa had the engineering know how to get into space but not necessarily a full understanding of a woman’s priorities, or even their menstrual cycle. “The most obvious and amusing missteps were in crew equipment – clothing, parachutes, helmets, hygiene needs,” says Sullivan. “I think these were all innocent gaffes, and that the teams responsible for those did the best they could with what they knew.”
NasaWhile not everything hit the mark for the women, Nasa did get things right too.
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