Space pen

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Warning — another in the JC’s collection of amusing but apocryphal stories about space flight. This one an excellent fable for shutting up technolocal evangelist types.

During the heady days of the space program, technologists hit upon a snag: in zero-gravity, a ballpoint pen will not work as it relies on gravity pushing ink down under the ball mechanism. This is why you cannot write upside down with a biro.

What to do, for our brave astronauts of the sky? Well, Americans being the entrepreneurial types they are, NASA commissioned a chap by the name of Fisher to design a pen that would work in zero gravity. The result, after hundreds of thousands of dollars of research and development, was the Fisher Space Pen, a device so clever that it was used reliably on missions from Apollo 7 onwards and and can still be purchased from good retailers today.

The Russian space program had the same problem. They sent their cosmonauts into space with pencils.

Errata

The story is only partly true — or false, if you take the Snopes categorisation — and the reasons for the bits that are right it far more subtle.

It had occurred to NASA to use pencils: indeed it had used pencils on all missions up to Apollo 7. However the graphite in pencil lead has a habit of flaking, which presented some respiratory risks and could potentially interfere with instruments. Also, after the Apollo 1 fire, which killed three astronauts on the launch pad, NASA was interested removing flammable objects — like wooden pencils — from the cockpit.

But still.

See also

• The redoubtable Snopes account of this “urban legend”
• Reg technology
• Good luck, Mr. Gorsky