NASA, with the tampons.
this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2025
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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.
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.
A 100-count box seems like an absurdly large unit size. Are you doing the very thing that the anecdote is intended to highlight?
They definitely come in 100 counts. This part isn't speculation. I have no Idea what NASA procurement looks like though, and I don't have anyone to ask.
It's either super complicated and expensive tampons with certification or some employee being send to the nearest supermarket
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.