Way back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and there were two world superpowers -- the U.S. and Russia (okay, technically, it was the USSR, but Russia and the USSR were used interchangeably - for the sake of convenience, we're going to use Russia here) -- there was this contest between us and them known as the Space Race.
That was back when America had pride in itself, had lofty objectives, and had the technological, economical, and spiritual resources to strive and achieve. In other words, pre-obama.
Anyway, back then when NASA first started sending up astronauts, they quickly discovered that ball-point pens would not work in zero gravity.
To combat this problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and $12 billion developing a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside down, underwater, on almost any surface including glass and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to over 300° C.
The Russians used a pencil...
3 comments:
I didn't see that coming. But I guess I should have.
Shhhhhhhhh!!! That crack about the pencil is classified!! Now the Chinese will be all over it and raise the price. You're in trouble now! (Sarc Ooof;-)
Or maybe not:
"A common urban legend states that, faced with the fact that ball-point pens will not write in zero-gravity, NASA spent a large amount of money to develop a pen that would write in the conditions experienced during spaceflight (the result purportedly being the Fisher Space Pen), while the Soviet Union took the simpler (and cheaper) route of just using pencils.
Russian cosmonauts used pencils, and grease pencils on plastic slates until also adopting a space pen in 1969 with a purchase of 100 units for use on all future missions.[1] NASA programs previously used pencils (for example a 1965 order of mechanical pencils[2]) but because of the substantial dangers that broken-off pencil tips and graphite dust pose in zero gravity to electronics and the flammable nature of the wood present in pencils[2] a better solution was needed. NASA never approached Paul Fisher to develop a pen, nor did Fisher receive any government funding for the pen's development. Fisher invented it independently, and then asked NASA to try it. After the introduction of the AG7 Space Pen, both the American and Soviet (later Russian) space agencies adopted it."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Pen
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/613/1
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fact-or-fiction-nasa-spen
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