‘I can’t remember feeling as excited about the future’: redesigning space travel for women

The drive for more women and greater diversity in the space sector will lead to new ideas and innovations, from spacesuits to toilets and beyond

Remember when Nasa sent a woman to space for only six days and they gave her 100 tampons and asked will that be enough?" So goes last year's viral TikTok referring to astronaut Sally Ride being asked by Nasa engineers in 1983 whether 100 tampons would be sufficient for her week-long stay in space (she was not actually sent with them).

Recalling the incident some years later, Ride, America's first woman astronaut, said: There were probably some other, similar sorts of issues, just because they had never thought about what kind of personal equipment a female astronaut would take."