That and NASA is a very safety conscious organization. So they want to overestimate everything and include way more than they need. So when she said a couple per day you can round that to 5 for safety, then considering it's a 6 day mission they want to include triple the amount of needed supplies which means 18 days worth. 18*5=90 which is pretty close to 100 so let's round up again. Plus tampons are a useful first aid tool, especially in zero gravity. You shove some into an open wound and it'll prevent blood from spilling all over the very sensitive equipment. Does a woman need 100 tampons for 6 days? Of course not, but she wasn't going to spend a week in the mountains, she was going to space, so the safety precautions were much more stringent
It's also a weight thing. Tampons are pretty light, it's like one hundred per pound, so they probably said "we can budget x pounds for this" and didn't think much about the reasoning behind why they're sending several hundred tampons into space, but we're entirely focused on how.
Less than that I think, and I’d suspect NASA would do load calculations in metric.
According to this reputable (first result on Google) High School Science Fair Project ^PDF, the average tampon is about 1g. I wouldn’t be surprised if they just budgeted 100g for it.
There's also the point that they don't go bad. It might be easier to send a load up now, that try and fit enough for each female astronaut into every flight.
Just a word of advice, the tampon in a wound thing, as much as the Russian military might advise it, is not good medical technique. Do not use a tampon to plug a wound. It'll likely do more harm than good. Just apply pressure to it from the outside with your hand if you have literally no other option.
Luckily I'm sure there's plenty of perfectly good alternatives for them. I don't think we need to even discuss that as am option. Some people will literally buy them for their IFAK in case of gunshot wounds on earth though, so I thought I'd clear it up.
I learned recently that in space you might not need to piss as the piss floats in your bladder.
normally you get 3/4s full and really need a slash, but in space it can fill up totally without you feeling anything and then just bust out your urethra without notice.
Not that I disagree that NASA isn't safety conscious, but I've recently watched a video about the challenge disaster which seemingly could easily have been avoided if they had listened to the weather concerns or redesigned their solid boosters after issues were observed in the first place. I guess in that case they just got too complacent.
NASA is obsessed with redundancy, especially when the weight allowance lets them run away with it.
Add that to the fact that most of the engineers were men, and had literally no clue about how many tampons are needed for a normal woman on earth, and you end up with 100 being sent up for a two-week mission.
Apparently someone did, and then the response was that tampons are low enough weight that the packaging to send them was the majority of the weight, even when sending 100, so they sent 100.
They also developed a zero-g makeup kit because they thought that female astronauts would want that. It had eyeliner, lip gloss, foundation, and blush. All specially selected to not generate dust.
The makeup kit never actually flew, likely because someone asked an actual woman if she would ever want that shit in space.
I could see a woman, even an astronaut, carrying about what they looked like on the news when they land. I could also see them not caring. Mileage varies
Zero-G makeup kit sounds like a feasible thing to research, actually. But to utilise it, we haven't researched epic space station party technology yet. So, you know, priorities aren't great.
They did. That's why they didn't send that many. It's not like it took them a long time to figure what the worst case number would be that fit in the budget.