In 1978 Nasa announced 35 new astronauts for a new era of spaceflight – and six of them were women. Here's how the Space Shuttle programme chipped away at one of Nasa's blind spots.

On 18 June 1983, Space Shuttle Challenger prepared for launch. STS-7 was Nasa's seventh Shuttle mission for the world's first reusable spacecraft. On board, among its crew of five, was Californian physicist Sally Ride. Until then, only two women had ever been into space.

Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova had made history more than two decades earlier in 1961. Nineteen years later, in 1982, Svetlana Seviskaya became the second woman in space after the Soviets got wind that the US was going to fly its first woman. Although an astronaut Barbie doll appeared in US shops in 1965 – sporting practical boots and a silvery spacesuit – American women had to wait a lot longer for the real thing.

By the 1980s both the world and fashion had changed. The revamped 1985 astronaut Barbie sported glittery silver leggings and had a matching handbag. There were fuchsia-pink puffed sleeves, a short skirt and pink knee-length high-heeled boots.

While heels were definitely not part of Ride's mission accessories, Nasa did provide cosmetics in the form of mascara, eye shadow and lipstick. They were inside a Personal Preference Kit (PPK) for its six new female astronauts: Ride, Judy Resnik, Anna Fisher, Kathryn Sullivan, Shannon Lucid and Rhea Seddon.

Ride, it turned out, did not use the make-up.

Neither did her astronaut trainee colleague Kathryn Sullivan, a year later, when she became the first American woman to perform a spacewalk.

"Several of us reacted with a mix of bemusement and annoyance at the 'Female PPK' cosmetic kit," says Sullivan, who later played a crucial role repairing the Hubble Space Telescope and is co-author of How to Spacewalk: Step-by-Step with Shuttle Astronauts.

"A whole kit devoted to make-up suggested to me that someone thought we might be less mission-focused than our male counterparts, or we were obliged to live up some journalistic stereotype," says Sullivan.

Not every female astronaut from this intake, however, eschewed the cosmetics. Seddon recalls on her website: "I spoke up for the minority. If there would be pictures taken of me from space, I didn't want to fade into the background so I requested some basic items… It was interesting to me that that I wasn't the sole space traveller whose in-flight pictures showed a bit of lipstick and blush".

Ride never wore make-up but there were other issues with the PPK. "The women had already lobbied to replace the British Sterling deodorant, the men's hair tonic and the Old Spice shaving cream with more female-friendly lotions and potions," says Lynn Sherr, author of Sally Ride: America's First Woman in Space.

But, on some occasions, the sex of those six astronaut trainees was simply forgotten. "Back in 1978, when she was invited to Edwards Air Force Base to see the test landing of Space Shuttle Enterprise," says Sherr, "every visiting astronaut – including the women – received souvenirs of the occasion: gold-plated Shuttle tie clips and cufflinks".

While personal preferences will differ, one aspect of space travel preparation for the new recruits required a basic knowledge of biology.

"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," Sullivan told me in an earlier interview.

"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,........

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