Status: Urban Legend
Dwayne Day has
an interesting article in Space Review about the urban legend of the Million Dollar Space Pen. I'm sure you've heard the legend before. It's the one in which NASA pays a million dollars to develop a pen that will write in space. The Russians, meanwhile, being a bit more practical and budget-conscious, just use a pencil for their space missions.
The truth is that the space pen was independently developed in the mid-1960s by Paul Fisher of the Fisher Pen Company. He did it completely on his own,
without prompting by NASA and without NASA money. It turned out to be a good pen, and NASA later started to use it. But they paid around $2 a piece for them. Not $1 million. Day notes that:
"The Million Dollar Space Pen Myth is just that, a myth. The pens never cost a lot of money and were not developed by wasteful bureaucrats or overactive NASA engineers. The real story of the Space Pen is less interesting than the myth, but in many ways more inspiring. It is not a story of NASA bureaucrats versus simplistic Russians, but a story of a clever capitalist who built a superior product and conducted some innovative marketing. That story, however, is a little harder to sell to a public that believes what it wants to believe."
I know that you can still buy space pens. I saw them for sale a few months ago at Restoration Hardware.
Comments
I've heard that they're not prone to leaking, but if they *do* leak, it's.. bad.
"Paul Fisher had been manufacturing better writing instruments with a devotion to accuracy, intellectual honesty and fairness long before the United States Space Program began. But when astronauts started to explore the reaches of outer space, Fisher realized that no existing pen could perform in its boiling hot vacuum. His common sense approach and practical experiments resulted in the invention of the sealed-pressurized Fisher Space Pen. After months of rigorous testing, NASA selected the Fisher Space Pen for use on all of the Apollo missions. They are still used on all manned space flights American and Russian."
So much for the Russian pencil story.
He had clip boards...but they kept breaking.
People probably have them confused with all the stories about the U.S. military paying $400 for a hammer and $13,000 for a toilet seat and so forth. Many of those reports are true, but more because of the corrupt procurement process than because the hardware is especially sophisticated.
It occurred to me, too, that pencils would be very impractical in a spaceship. What happens when you need to sharpen it? Just imagine trying to live in a sealed capsule with all those tiny shavings floating around weightlessly everywhere. You'd be choking on them constantly.
They have their problems too, so the space equivalent is something like a mechanical pencil with the waxy lead held tight. When they can't use a regular pen, that is.
Now what they *really* need to develop is porn that works in zero-G...