Robert Gilruth, Manager of the Houston Space Center, where they were thoroughly tested and approved for use in Space in September 1965. (NASA tested the pressurized Space Pens at -50☌, but because of the residential heat in the pen it also writes for many minutes in the cold shadows.)įisher spent over one million dollars in trying to perfect the ball point pen before he made his first successful pressurized pens in 1965. In hot temperatures of +150☌ in sunlight and also in the cold shadows of space where the temperatures drop to -120☌.It also had to work in the extreme conditions of outer space: Because of the fire in Apollo 1, in which three Astronauts died, NASA required a writing instrument that would not burn in a 100% oxygen atmosphere.
No development costs have ever been charged to the government. All research and development costs were paid by Paul Fisher. They passed all the tests and have been used ever since on all manned space flights, American and Russian. The sample Space Pens were thoroughly tested by NASA. The pens were all metal except for the ink, which had a flash point above 200☌. Robert Gilruth, Director of the Houston Space Center. Paul Fisher realized the astronauts needed a safer and more dependable writing instrument, so in July 1965 he developed the pressurized ball pen, with its ink enclosed in a sealed, pressurized ink cartridge.įisher sent the first samples to Dr. In addition, both the lead and the wood of the pencil could burn rapidly in the pure oxygen atmosphere. They could float into an eye or nose or cause a short in an electrical device. When the astronauts began to fly, like the Russians, they used pencils, but the leads sometimes broke and became a hazard by floating in the atmosphere where there was no gravity. This is how Fisher themselves described the development of their Space Pen: After that agency tested and approved the pen's suitability for use in space flights, they purchased a number of the instruments from Fisher for a modest price. Fisher of the Fisher Pen Co., who spent his own money on the project and, once he perfected his AG-7 "Anti-Gravity" Space Pen, offered it to NASA.
The "space pen" that has since become famous through its use by astronauts was developed independently by Paul C.
When the solution of providing astronauts with a ballpoint pen that would work under weightless conditions and extreme temperatures came about, though, it wasn't because NASA had thrown hundreds of thousands of dollars (inflated to $12 billion in the latest iterations of this tale) in research and development money at the problem. (As well, after the fatal Apollo 1 fire in 1967, NASA was anxious to avoid having astronauts carry flammable objects such as pencils onboard with them.) astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts initially used pencils on space flights, but those writing instruments were not ideal: pencil tips can flake and break off, and having such objects floating around space capsules in near-zero gravity posed a potential harm to astronauts and equipment. The lesson of the infamous "space pen" anecdote related above, about NASA's spending a small fortune to develop a ballpoint pen that astronauts could use in outer space while completely overlooking the simple and elegant solution adopted by the Soviet space program (give cosmonauts pencils instead), is a valid one: sometimes we expend a great deal of time, effort, and money to create a "high-tech" solution to a problem, when a perfectly good, cheap, and simple answer is right before our eyes.Īs good a story and moral as that may be, however, this anecdote doesn't offer a real-life example of that syndrome.īoth U.S. The Soviets - with the simple elegance their scientists are so rightly famed for - opted instead to use a pencil. There is a charming anecdote that roams from e-mail box to e-mail box around the world about how, at the height of the space race, the Americans and Soviets approached the same problem: how an astronaut (or cosmonaut) could use a pen to write in zero gravity.Īs the story goes, the Americans spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on an ambitious, gravity-immune ballpoint pen they successfully developed such a pen and this pen went on to become a massive commercial success in the private sector. Your taxes are due again - enjoy paying them. Gravity, upside-down, on almost any surface including glassĪnd at temperatures ranging from below freezing to over 300 C. To combat this problem, NASA scientists spent aĭecade and $12 billion developing a pen that writes in zero When NASA started sending astronauts into space, they quicklyĭiscovered that ball-point pens would not work in zero
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