What It's Like to Get Your Period in Space


Here's something you've probably never thought about before: What happens when an astronaut gets her period under zero-gravity conditions? Does it even come out? Can it come back up?!

Medical Daily recently did some digging into these very questions, and it looks like the issue did indeed come up when NASA started sending the first women into space.

"It was one of those unknowns," astronaut Margaret Rhea Seddon, who went into space during the '80s and '90s, said in an interview for the NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project. "A lot of people predicted retrograde flow of menstrual blood, and it would get out in your abdomen, get peritonitis, and horrible things would happen. All the women were going, 'I don’t think so.' But you couldn’t prove it or disprove it."

Eventually, they decided to just try it out and send someone home if it led to any medical complications. The verdict?

"I’m not totally sure who had the first period in space, but they came back and said, 'Period in space, just like period on the ground. Don’t worry about it,'" Seddon said. There were, however, some logistical questions.

"Tampons or pads, how many would you use if you had a heavy flow, five days or seven days of flow?" she recalled wondering. "Because we didn’t know how it would be different up there. What’s the max that you could use?" She ended up packing about 50 percent more supplies than she normally would, since she didn't know how things would turn out in space. "The men were all, 'Oh man, that’s a lot of stuff!'" she recalled.

According to Medical Daily, there's a menstruation-in-space study currently sorting out issues like this. They're investigating whether blood clot risks for certain contraceptives might be higher in space, as well as what the best way is to eliminate waste resulting from space periods. Some astronauts go on combined oral contraceptives to suppress periods altogether, the researchers said, while others use IUDs or implants since they don't take up as much space as pills.

Probably something you'll never have to worry about, but it is an interesting aspect of space exploration.