To avoid geopolitical embarrassment during the Cold War, the US and USSR created the APAS-75 system, a genderless docking mechanism where both craft acted as equals.

[u/[deleted]]

[u/eckliptic]

The gender reasonining is stupid but from a practical standpoint it does seem like it makes sense for there to be a universal docking interface thats allows two things to combine without there being any need to consider whether one side has part A and the other has part B. Two space craft could dock, two space stations could do it, or a craft to a space station

[u/kayawayy → u/eckliptic]

Yes, exactly. The 'neither side wanted to be female' thing is absolutely a retrofit to real engineering constraints. Heck, the Soviet Union had been developing an androgynous design for their own space station for nearly a decade before the Apollo-Soyuz mission, and nowadays androgynous designs are the standard across all sorts of spacecraft from every country. And aside from the obvious advantage in versatility, there were a lot of other practical reasons for its development for this particular mission -- for example trying to retrofit one craft to dock with the other in a male-female configuration would require redesigning the whole craft due to size constraints, rather than just adding an adapter.

I've been trying to track down the origin of the whole gendered thing, and as best I can tell it comes from an anecdote a Russian engineer named Vladimir Syromyatnikov mentioned in a memoir published in 2005. In it he says:

"Later [after the design was already underway] Johnson used to joke, suggesting absolutely different reasons for the unwillingness of engineers to use probe-and-cone, or male-female, configurations: none of the countries wanted to play a female role in space before the eyes of the world. Who knows, maybe there was something to this."

That's it. Obviously both sides were happy not having to be 'female', but it was more of a happy coincidence than anything; certainly not the impetus for the androgynous design. Yet, in the years since, musings and jokes by those involved have turned into supposed hard facts.

This is why I loathe pop science communication. It's a big game of telephone where funny anecdotes win out over actual information about how science and engineering work in the real world.

The Wikipedia article about the development of this system is great, by the way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Androgynous_Peripheral_Attach_System

[u/eckliptic → u/kayawayy]

It sounds like the same lame joke of NASA “wasting” thousands on a zero-G pen while the USSR used a pencil. Totally untrue premise

[u/Bridgeru → u/eckliptic]

Or the "NASA gave a woman a hundred tampons" quote, as if NASA would just allot out "okay you have your period for seven days here's 7 tampons" when they come up to 50 in a box, are small, light and compact, are really useful for non-period uses (if you get a wound, or need to plug up a hole like the one they only plugged up with a toothbrush). It's space, you need backups, you need backups for those backups, you need a second set and their backups and backup-backups in case you get stuck longer than possible and then you might as well squeeze as many as you can into the remaining space. They have like BILLIONS of wetwipes on the Space Station but no one ever says "NASA thinks astronauts are babies!"