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Comment by sam_goody | Hacker News Reader

I understood that anecdote to be true.

Fisher spent $1M (of "then" money) creating a "space pen", capitalized on the unique opportunity and publicity, and went from a startup to a $60M company. They knew that the astronauts could use a pencil, but that wouldn't be very profitable for them.

For Fisher, it was a capitalist triumph, and symbolized American values. For the U.S.S.R. it symbolized U.S. wastefulness, and was portrayed in a negative light.

For the media, if they can portray something as terrible, they will. It sells papers. So that is kind of a capitalist triumph as well.

In the end, it turned out to be dangerous to use pencils in space (graphite turns into a floating flammable dust while writing), so eventually both the Soviets and the Americans bought space pens.

Which was great, as Fisher recouped about $1K just from NASA! More importantly, that marketing ploy may have saved the entire spacecraft - the law of unintended consequences!

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The anecdote usually isn't "a private company invested a million of their own dollars into making a 'space pen'", it's "NASA invested a million dollars into making a space pen, while the soviets just used a pencil".

And I mean, you clearly know that version isn't true. As you say, fisher only recouped $1k from NASA (I think was just the original order, I believe they're still used today), and the soviets also switched over to the pen (incidentally at the same price, $2.39/pen). You say "eventually", but the soviets only took a year to switch.

And while we're at it, NASA used pencils before the space pen just like the soviets did, which makes the "while the soviets did something else" part even less true.

> that marketing ploy may have saved the entire spacecraft - the law of unintended consequences

I'm reasonably confident that "avoiding flammable substances that tends to give off flammable flakes (graphite)" was an intended consequence, not an unintended one.

The first version I heard went through a long diatribe on how “the US” (implying NASA) spent a long time and a million dollars creating a pen that would work in space and the punchline was “Well, the Soviets just used a pencil”.

Glad to see that this version has been losing ground to better retellings. If you check the Wiki article[1], the urban legend is mentioned

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Pen

I'm pretty sure regular ballpoint pens work just fine in space. Try writing with one upsidedown in earth gravity; they work fine.

They don't work well.

They actually don’t. They work fine for a few words then the ink fades out and is basically gone after the fifth or sixth word. I just tried (go ahead and try it yourself, I used just a regular Bic pen). A similar thing occurs when writing on a vertical surface.

Pens also do poorly when cold.

Space pens use a pressurized ink cartridge that works independent of orientation and works when hot or cold. They’re cheap. It’d be dumb to NOT use a space pen on a mission now.

Before the pressurized ink cartridge of the space pen was invented, they used grease pencils.

Actually, the space pen is an example of successful private invention inspired by and then applied to and utilized by NASA.

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