Space Pen

A good fact-checking on the old Space Pen story:

The billion-dollar space pen
Everybody has heard of the infamous Space Pen.

Space has its urban legends of course, and the Million Dollar Space Pen is one of the more enduring ones. It is neither as outlandish nor as unbelievable as the story about faking the Moon landings, and even though it seems more credible than a massive government conspiracy, it is probable that fewer people have heard it.

The story goes like this: in the 1960s, NASA astronauts discovered that their pens did not work in zero gravity. So like good engineers, they went to work and designed a wonder pen. It worked upside down. It worked in vacuum. It worked in zero gravity. It even worked underwater! And it only cost a million dollars!

The crafty Russians used a pencil.

This story, like most modern urban legends, has proliferated on the Internet, but it has also been passed by word of mouth. I�ve even heard a well-known space historian tell the story while talking about his new book, getting the expected laugh from his audience when he held up a Number 2 pencil for the punchline. And, of course, the story has also been embellished, with cost of the writing device getting ever higher, from a million dollars to a hundred million dollars to a billion dollars in some variations. Undoubtedly at some point the cost will equal the mythical trillion-dollar price of a mission to Mars.

The article then goes on to talk about the $128.84 pencil that was used on Gemini 3:

This, however, was actually the second controversy about the flight. Earlier in the month, several newspapers reported that the mission would carry two pencils that cost $128.84 apiece. NASA had spent $4,382.50 to purchase 34 of the pencils.

Members of the public were outraged at NASA�s profligate spending and naturally they demanded answers from their congressmen. On the day of the flight itself, Congressman John Wydler, of the Fourth District in New York and a member of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics, wrote a letter to NASA Administrator James Webb (PDF, 1.3 MB) asking for a full investigation of the expensive pencils and an explanation why their high costs were justified. NASA received other letters as well, such as one from the President of Elgin School Supply Company of San Francisco.

NASA officials then had to explain to Congress and people like the president of the Elgin School Supply Company that the pencils were made of lightweight, high strength materials that could be attached to the inside of the spacecraft. The pencil housings had been expanded so that the astronauts could use them while wearing their bulky spacesuit gloves. The writing mechanism inside the housing had been procured from a local office supply house and had cost $1.75 each.

And the pen in question:

In the mid-1960s Paul Fisher of the Fisher Pen Company developed the Space Pen. He did this on his own, without prompting by NASA and without NASA money. What he did want from NASA was publicity, and to this end he managed to get his congressman to insert a promotional history of his Space Pen into the Congressional Record in March 1966. Fisher then contacted NASA and sought their review of promotional literature about the Space Pen.

A NASA official evaluated the advertising copy for the Space Pen and noted that the company �is not now and has never been under contract to NASA � [Manned Spacecraft Center] for the supply of any writing instrument to be used in a manned spacecraft.� However, a different Fisher pen, known as the AG-7 pen, was under consideration for carrying aboard American spacecraft.

Over two months after Fisher first contacted NASA, the space agency replied and disapproved his advertising, (PDF, 0.6 MB) which the agency called �quite misleading.� NASA�s procurement office was at the time purchasing Fisher�s AG-7 pens at a cost of $4 apiece (still a significant amount of money in 1967), and was not buying the Space Pen, which cost $1.98.

Fascinating bit of history...