{"id":122997,"date":"2025-09-06T11:02:12","date_gmt":"2025-09-06T11:02:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/122997\/"},"modified":"2025-09-06T11:02:12","modified_gmt":"2025-09-06T11:02:12","slug":"how-the-space-shuttle-helped-women-break-nasas-glass-ceiling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/122997\/","title":{"rendered":"How the Space shuttle helped women break Nasa&#8217;s glass ceiling"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"sc-9a00e533-0 hxuGS\">&#8220;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,&#8221; Sullivan told me in an earlier interview.<\/p>\n<p class=\"sc-9a00e533-0 hxuGS\">&#8220;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, &#8216;No, no&#8217;. She thought that was really too much, thank you very much.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"sc-9a00e533-0 hxuGS\">As you may have gathered, Nasa had the engineering know how to get into space but not necessarily a full understanding of a woman&#8217;s priorities, or even their menstrual cycle. &#8220;The most obvious and amusing missteps were in crew equipment \u2013 clothing, parachutes, helmets, hygiene needs,&#8221; says Sullivan. &#8220;I think these were all innocent gaffes, and that the teams responsible for those did the best they could with what they knew.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/1756963147_457_grey-placeholder.png\" class=\"sc-d1200759-0 dkIvM hide-when-no-script\" aria-label=\"image unavailable\"\/><img decoding=\"async\"   src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/p0m13glh.jpg.webp.webp\" loading=\"lazy\" alt=\"Nasa Nasa had to make adjustments to equipment for female astronauts like Anna Fisher (Credit: Nasa)\" class=\"sc-d1200759-0 dvfjxj\"\/>NasaNasa had to make adjustments to equipment for female astronauts like Anna Fisher (Credit: Nasa)<\/p>\n<p class=\"sc-9a00e533-0 hxuGS\">While not everything hit the mark for the women, Nasa did get things right too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"&#8220;The Nasa guys had realised that women might be women and therefore, while they were flying, it might&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":122998,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[64,63,128,285],"class_list":{"0":"post-122997","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-space"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122997","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122997"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122997\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/122998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}