A Four-Year-Old’s Museum Trip Becomes a Mission
Manju Bangalore was four years old when a visit to the Air and Space Museum in McMinnville, Oregon, first opened the door to space. What she found there was not a rocket diagram but a person: Kalpana Chawla, the first Indian woman to travel to space. Bangalore, now 28, describes the effect plainly — she did not yet have the word “representation,” but seeing someone who looked like her do something that enormous told her the thing was possible for her too.
The path from that museum floor to a Virgin Galactic manifest ran through physics and mathematics at the University of Oregon, a White House internship on science policy under President Obama, and two NASA centers. At the Marshall Space Flight Center she worked on propulsion systems. At Johnson Space Center she worked on cockpit displays for the Orion spacecraft, inside the astronaut office — the room where crews are made.
That phrase is not decoration. Bangalore coined it while enduring a painful period and sensing a larger problem behind it. Periods, she argues, go undiscussed because they are stigmatized, and the cost of that silence is measurable in lives. A subject treated as impolite conversation turns out to sit on the boundary between embarrassment and mortality.
The Experiment That Has Never Been Flown
In 2027, Bangalore and Priya Abiram will lead the first dedicated research mission on menstruation in microgravity, flying suborbitally with Virgin Galactic. [1] The experiment has two arms. The first examines menstrual fluid dynamics in weightlessness. The second measures how pads and tampons actually perform during spaceflight.
The mission did not appear from nowhere. Bangalore had already flown a parabolic flight — an aircraft arc that produces short bursts of weightlessness — during which she ran a menstrual fluid dynamics experiment in zero gravity. [1] A second parabolic flight followed.
What the team is chasing is a data vacuum. The 2027 flight is designed to start filling that sample, and Bangalore is explicit that it should be the first of many — each flight adding to a dataset that currently has no baseline. A single suborbital hop will not settle the physiology. It will establish that the question is askable.
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