NASA’s Expensive Space Pen

By Shamini Bundell

The pen is mightier than the... umm... pencil.

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Some time during the space race the astronauts and cosmonauts related to their relative bosses that their pens didn’t work in space. Great minds set to work on the problem.

NASA’s solution:
We need a pen that functions in zero gravity! Quick let’s spend millions designing an awesome space pen that works in freezing and boiling temperatures and underwater, oh and also in space!

Russian solution:
Ve need to buy sum pencils.

I would like this to be true. Especially the part where the Russians speak English in a silly accent. But it’s not. In fact both sides started off using pencils, but the leads kept breaking off and getting stuck in things; also NASA wasn’t keen on having flammable wooden sticks floating around up there. A bloke called Fisher and his company decided to develop ‘astronaut pens’ without any money from NASA until they started buying them. Soviet space programs also ended up using the Fisher pens, as did many an excited child with no real need to write upside down, in the bath or in temperatures of -35 to 250 degrees Celsius but who nonetheless got extreme satisfaction from simply owning one.

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