I was listening to Dave Thomas speak, and heard the truth between the SPACE PEN myth.
For those that don’t know the story. A company called Fischer, realised that the US astronauts couldn’t use any pens in space. What a pain!
So, they sank millions of dollars to create the perfect pen. One that would handle the environmental constraints of space.
This went on for a few years, and meanwhile the russian cosmanaults were using PENCILS.
That is a fun punch-line, but there is more to the story which you don’t often here.
It turned out that Fischer weren’t dumb. Neither was NASA. They were using pencils until that point, but the worry was that a piece of graphite would come off of the pen and accidently float over to make a contact that you wouldn’t want it to make. In an oxygen rich environment, this wouldn’t be a good thing!
