This is a really similar story to one from Trojan condoms, IIRC, whereby everyone was buying the Large size, so the Magnum was born.
I'd believe it in a heartbeat for Trojan, but I have a hard time believing it in the context of a NASA aerospace program. Maybe they joked about it, and the larger size names were born out of that joke, but I can't believe that NASA didn't have doctors and engineers sizing the sheaths for each astronaut, or at least making the decision for the astronauts from the sizes they had. This isn't like they were walking into a walmart and had to decide on their own; this was a multi-million dollar first-of-its-kind space program.