I love internet folklore. We can capture an important true story, slap it onto an eye-catching picture, and transform it into a digestible bit of information.
Unfortunately, memes aren’t always reliable sources of science.Did you hear about the subplot of the space race where we couldn’t get pens to work in space? According to both the internet and Aaron Sorkin, the US spent like a bajillion dollars to get a pen to work in zero G, but the Russians brilliantly just used a fucking pencil.
You know these were literally rockets scientists, right?
Today’s Moment of Science… the bajillion dollar pen that wasn’t.
A lot of things become more difficult when we have to do them in zero G. Eating. Pissing. Yodeling (I don’t have confirmation on this but yodeling seems hard enough anyway). And of course, taking all those careful notes for scientific experiments.
Though the rumor is that Russians “just used a pencil,” they were using grease pencils. They got the job done, but smudged readily and peeling away the paper wrapper created a floating mess.
When astronauts went to space for Project Gemini in 1965, they likewise took pencils- which should lay to rest the idea that the US never tried pencils. They just weren’t the optimal writing instrument for several reasons. It’s a scientific best practice to keep contemporaneous records in ink to prevent possible data tampering. Graphite breaking off from their mechanical pencils could get into the equipment and injure the astronauts. Pencils also have flammable components, and nothing makes NASA go all ‘Houston we have a problem’ like the words ‘fire in the spaceship.’
Also, the pencils cost $128.89 apiece. People were pissed.
Paul C. Fisher of the Fisher Pen Company got to work.
Now called the Fisher Space Pen Company, if a pen can be described as a fucking marvel, they made it. The ink cartridge is pressurized with nitrogen to both keep the ink flowing and prevent it from drying in the presence of oxygen. It can be used in a weightless environment, underwater (or submerged in other fluids for all your pudding related note taking incidents), and in temperatures from -50F up to 400F. The ink turns from blue to green if the pen gets too hot, which is neat but given the upper temperature limit I’m not sure how helpful that feature is for human life.
The space pen didn’t cost the government a cent for research and development.
It didn’t cost anywhere near close to the scandalous $165 million it was rumored to be. It cost $1 million to develop, all paid for by Fisher. Astronauts and cosmonauts alike still write with them, and they cost a mere $2.39 in bulk.
It retails for $50 today.
This has been your daily Moment of Science and a somewhat self-aware plea not to get your science history from memes.
Well, nothing does electronics good like graphite dust settling between connections, save if it’s a random wire chunk!
Fisher themselves admit that they approached NASA, who rejected their initial cost.
Personally, I bit the proverbial bullet and bought a few over the years. They were the only damned pen I ever found to actually work on the old wax paper version of the DoD field medical casualty cards.
https://brooksidepress.org/TCCC/lessons/lesson-2-controlling-bleeding-from-an-extremity/section-iii-applying-an-improvised-tourniquet/2-27-mark-the-casualty-and-continue-survey/us-field-medical-card-dd-form-1380/?cn-reloaded=1
Every other pen’s ink tended to not make much of a mark and the ball point refused to roll on them. Not even a Skillcraft pen managed that! Yeah, yet another Big Military “success story”, the tag survived the environment, but was incapable of accepting most writing media…
I actually heard this fact from the Keswick Pencil Museum in northern England way before memes were a thing on the internet. Being lied to from the internet I can take, being lied to from a museum hurts differently.