Hacker News Reader

Comment by breadbox | Hacker News Reader

I'm actually surprised that the truth is that close to the story. I've always assumed that it was largely invented ex nihilo. The actual story is actually not too far off, and is more interesting.

View on HN

But the myth gets the moral exactly backwards -- the pens solved a real problem, and because both NASA and Fisher knew most of the value of the deal was getting the "the same pen they use in SPACE!" endorsement, the government got the pens for almost free.

There's more to it than that. The Russians simply had a completely different philosophy to how the interior of spacecraft was supposed to be, as such their panels were not susceptible to the problems of graphite dust etc. This also had the side effect of making Russian capsules of the same era much more comfortable than their American equivalents, although the landing procedures could more than nullify whatever comfort benefits they had.

> although the landing procedures could more than nullify whatever comfort benefits they had.

Could you expand a little bit here, what to you mean?

If I had to guess, it's the fact that Russian spacecraft tend to land on the ground, and typically fire a rocket burst right before landing to slow down even more. It's the equivalent of getting kicked in the ass by a rocket-powered donkey, twice.

American craft land in the water, which is much more forgiving to begin with, and I don't think they fire rockets before hitting the surface.

(Although, I'd love to hear more about the other design differences.)

The modern Soyuz are pretty good though - 'soft landing' engines reduce the speed at impact to less than 5 feet per second (!), and there's shock-absorbing seats.

Archive.org link due to government shutdown in the US:

http://web.archive.org/web/20130928200146/http://www.nasa.go...

Good Guy Internet Archive. Serving government websites while their servers are "closed".

Video of the soft-landing engines: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2X2kaqYatI

Water landing means that the spacecraft is limited to a certain volume/mass ratio in order to float (preferably not upside down), withstand some waves, under/over pressure and 'salty water conduct electricity' problems etc. or alternatively turn to a submarine. I doubt water landing is so much easier than ground landing. And what you gonna do in case of crash-landing or some hull cracks?

I don't know about that. To me, the three-man Voskhod looks like the most uncomfortable spacecraft that was ever flown.

Hm, even more so than Mercury?

You might be right, though; hard to judge. Both sides were definitely in a hurry with designs.

According to the article, the Russians switched to using pens a year later as well, which implies pencils weren't such a perfect solution even for them.

I can imagine Russians let the Americans invent the pen and then just stole it. Total costs much much smaller anyway :)

Except that it was a private company that invented the pen and then sold it to the Russians and the Americans and even to the public. I am sure they have made back their $1million investment a couple times over.

They all used grease pencils anyway, like you do on boats, which don't leave conductive shavings.

http://www.spaceflownartifacts.com/flown_writing_instruments...

edit - and lots of other pens as well, the link above seems fairly comprehensive.

I'm also surprised, 1 million sounds like a lot of money for such a thing.

I'm guessing most of that money went to pay salaries, just like raising a $1M seed round in the Valley. Since Fisher invested their own money, it's hard to determine if the $1M was only used for the space pen. I would assume they didn't hire that many new engineers and simply allocated existing engineers to the space pen project. On the books it looks like $1M invested, but that amount might be significantly less.

$1m sounds like peanuts for a bunch of R&D on a mass-market high-tech consumer product.

Around $7 million in todays money.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+million+USD%2C++in+19...

Conversely, if you short out a panel due to conductive something and the spacecraft is lost due to the malfunction, it starts to look like maybe you should've invested more money in developing your flight instruments.

Space is a harsh environment - things sent up there need to be carefully considered.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com