NASA Engineers Offered Sally Ride 100 Tampons for a 7 Day Space Mission

Welcome to Reading List, our Saturday afternoon collection of tech, design, urbanism, and landscape reads from around the web. This week, we've got great pieces from The American Prospect, Modern Farmer, Ars Technica, Pacific Standard, and more. It's like crossfit for your brain.

American hero Sally Ride fought gender stereotypes and outright lack of understanding in the career that made her the first American woman in space. (NASA engineers once asked her if 100 tampons was the right number for a one-week mission). Those challenges persisted for Ride even long after her NASA career was over. As Ann Friedman puts it in this touching and insightful portrait of Ride, "to be first is to relinquish the complicated specifics of your story and become a caricature, a stand-in for the ideals of a movement or for the hope and pain of a moment in history." [The American Prospect]

Around 700 bicyclists are hit and killed by drivers every year in the U.S. Yet only one in five of those drivers will ever face charges. That startling statistic made M. Sophia Newman wonder: is hitting a cyclist with a car a low-risk way to commit homicide? [VICE]

California is experiencing yet another record-breaking drought season. That state just happens to be the cultural center of the U.S.'s startup culture, which, as Andy Wright reports, has led some entrepreneurs to pursue design and engineering solutions to the Golden State's water woes. [Modern Farmer]

You may not think of prisons as architectural items of study. But as Andy Wright explains, a prison's layout can change the lives of the prisoners it houses—good design can make safer, more secure, and more peaceful prisons that keep both inmates and staff happier and safer. [Pacific Standard]

The Android operating system for mobile devices has been around for more than six years. That may not sound like much, but in that span of time Android has gone through an astounding number of different design iterations. Ron Amadeo chronicles them all, from Android's nascent beginnings to its current status as the world's most popular mobile platform. It's an important exercise, because unlike old physical copies of software, early versions of Android disappear with every update. [Ars Technica]

Spoilers suck, especially now that there are so many ways to stream, download, and cast episodes of the most wildly popular shows, whenever and wherever you want. But what actually counts as a spoiler? Laura Hudson tries to nail down this slippery term, in the process examining why we care about them, and why we think spoiling a story is so damed rude. [Wired]

Whenever a new discovery comes out of a particle accelerator facility like CERN, science novices always ask the same question: Who cares? But the things we learn from these huge-budget facilities impact our everyday lives in some amazingly basic and unexpected ways. Linda Zeldovich breaks them down with "10 Reasons Why You Can't Live Without a Particle Accelerator." [Nautilus]

Image: Sally Ride's NASA portrait from 1983, from AP Images.

Randolm on December 20th, 2017 at 03:47 UTC »

Remember these are engineers. They'll do the math. Regardless of the subject or context. Then build in safety margins. Considering a hundred tampons could probably be packaged with nominal space requirements & possess hardly any weight, going overboard probably had no detrimental cost. Versus the potential cost of coming up short. I'm guessing they do somewhat similar math with all other personal care items.

HouseSomalian on December 20th, 2017 at 03:34 UTC »

Here's an actual source for the conversation

Ross-Nazzal: I had a question. I read an article recently that was published by Florida Today, and you had talked about what they had to add to the flight kit on STS-7, for instance, things like tampons. And there was a discussion about whether or not you should bring makeup on board the flight. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what else was included in the flight [kit], if you had any suggestions, or if they had any suggestions that you were opposed to, and why.

Ride: It’s actually kind of funny, because there was a reasonable amount of discussion about it. The engineers at NASA, in their infinite wisdom, decided that women astronauts would want makeup—so they designed a makeup kit. A makeup kit brought to you by NASA engineers. [Laughter] So, “What?” You can just imagine the discussions amongst the predominantly male engineers about what should go in a makeup kit. So they came to me, figuring that I could give them advice. It was about the last thing in the world that I wanted to be spending my time in training on. So I didn’t spend much time on it at all. But there were a couple of other female astronauts, who were given the job of determining what should go in the makeup kit, and how many tampons should fly as part of a flight kit. I remember the engineers trying to decide how many tampons should fly on a one-week flight; they asked, “Is 100 the right number?” “No. That would not be the right number.” They said, “Well, we want to be safe.” I said, “Well, you can cut that in half with no problem at all.” [Laughter]

Some more of the interview:

Wright: What type of preparations, if any, did NASA, especially at JSC, make to accommodate the female astronauts? Were there accommodations or facility changes to assist what females needed, compared to what the males had always just taken as their own?

Ride: There were some things. The most obvious was that they needed to add a women’s locker room to the astronaut gym. That and most other things were accomplished before we arrived. I think JSC worked hard to prepare for the arrival of women astronauts and female technical professionals. The technical staff at JSC—around four thousand engineers and scientists—was almost entirely male. There was just a very small handful of female scientists and engineers—I think only five or six out of the four thousand. The arrival of the female astronauts suddenly doubled the number of technical women at JSC!

Wright: It was a class of thirty-five, and a lot of attention was on the fact that it did include six females. How [was] the rest of the class impacted by the fact that so much of the attention was on six members instead of the whole thirty-five?

Ride: I think the rest of the class understood that that was natural and maybe even appreciated it! It was really a good group of thirty-five. The selection committee was looking for men that were comfortable working with women, that were used to working with women, and that had no problem working with women, and they succeeded. It was a very congenial class and we really didn’t have any issues at all within our group. They were very respectful, and incorporated us as part of the group from the very beginning. So we all walked in as rookies, neophytes in the astronaut corps. None of us knew anything about what was about to happen to us, and so as you can imagine we were a pretty close-knit group. None of the astronauts who applied did it for publicity. Everybody applied because this is what they wanted to do. So the males in the group didn’t really want to be spending their time with reporters; they wanted to be spending their time training and learning things. They didn’t seem to mind at all that more of the attention was paid to the women astronaut candidates. In fact, they wished us well. And, frankly the women probably would have preferred less attention.

Wright: How did the current astronaut corps accept the new class? It had been so long since they had any new ones added, and now thirty-five new ones showed up.

Ride: They seemed to accept us pretty well. We had them outnumbered, so I’m not sure they had a choice. It was clearly very different for them. They were used to a particular environment and culture. Most of them were test pilots. There were a few scientists, but most were test pilots. Of course the entire astronaut corps had been male, so they were not used to working with women. And there had been no additions to the astronaut corps in nearly ten years, so even having a large infusion of new blood changed their working environment. But, they knew that this was coming and they’d known it was coming for a couple of years. Well before the announced upcoming opportunity to apply for the astronaut corps, NASA had decided that women were going to be a part of it. So I think that the existing astronauts had a couple of years to adjust and come to terms with it. By the time that we actually arrived, they had adapted to the idea. We really didn’t have any issues with them at all. It was easy to tell though that the males in our group were really pretty comfortable with us, while the astronauts who’d been around for a while were not all as comfortable and didn’t quite know how to react. But, they were just fine and didn’t give us a hard time at all.

TheGayslamicQueeran on December 20th, 2017 at 02:54 UTC »

Was it?