You are probably familiar with the story of how NASA engineers, in the early days of the space race, considered the need for their astronauts to be able to make notes and calculations by hand and spent millions of dollars of public investment to develop a fountain pen that could write in space.
According to this story, when the Cold War ended, a Russian delegation of cosmonauts (a cosmonaut is the Eastern Bloc equivalent of a Western Bloc astronaut) visited Cape Canaveral and at some point an American engineer proudly told them about all the development they had done and all the investment it had taken to develop their space pen and then asked them (in a sarcastic tone) how they had solved the problem of writing in space. The Russian cosmonaut did not even answer. He took out his pencil, which he was casually holding to his ear, and showed it to the American engineer in a gesture that made everyone burst out laughing.
In the early days of the space race, there were no portable calculators. The use of slide rules required handwritten notes. Writing in space was therefore a necessity.
...And so this story, with its corresponding nebula of more or less sympathetic variants, travels through the social networks.
But that story is a myth....
.... nor did NASA develop space writing, nor do the Russians use carbon pencils.
The reality is that the space writing solutions available today are due to technical problems that have been known from the outset to all space agencies around the world. Indeed, the Americans also started using graphite pencils at the beginning of their space race, but they quickly realised that pencils not only don't work in space, they are also a huge hazard. The graphite tips of pencils are very brittle. When broken, carbon and wood fragments, which are highly flammable, are scattered in all directions by the effects of microgravity and often end up inside electrical panels and can short-circuit leads, act as glow resistors in an oxygen-saturated environment or simply block connection ports or inlets of any kind. Graphite pencils were banned practically from the beginning in all space activities. They were especially forbidden after the Apollo 1 accident in which three crew members died in a cabin fire due to the ignition of highly flammable materials and also after the Gemini 3 mission in which an astronaut smuggled a sandwich into the space capsule where he saw the chaos that can result from breadcrumbs spreading without gravity..
Of course, it was also soon realised that ink pens and felt-tip pens did not work either.. They require the earth's gravity to supply and deposit the ink on the writing surface. As they do not work upside down, they do not work in microgravity either. In addition to the problem of microgravity, it was also the case that extremely high temperatures would denature the inks into coloured lumps, while extremely low temperatures would freeze them into crystals, rendering the pen unusable.
However, writing in space was still a necessity. Bear in mind that in the 1960s there were no portable calculators and in order to complete simple operations, use was made of slide rules consisting of plastic tablets that slid together to align the operands in one area of the ruler and output the result in another area by the same method. This process required making subtotal notations by hand to arrive at the final calculations. Therefore, the need to write in space was absolute.
But it was not NASA that ended up providing The first step was to develop a solution for space writing by investing millions of taxpayer dollars, but rather by a US company with private capital.
In 1965, the Fisher Pen Company invested $1 million (at the time) to design and patent a biro that could write face up, under water and at temperatures between -35°C and +120°C. To allow writing in any orientation or in microgravity they developed an ink encapsulation with nitrogen at a pressure of 2.5 atmospheres. The pressure of the capsule pushes the ink against the tungsten carbide ball at the tip of the fountain pen, releasing the ink like a normal biros. The whole thing is encased in a tough metal body including an inner vacuum insulation (like a coffee thermos) to reduce the effect of the extreme temperatures to which it would be subjected.
Also developed the necessary inks from exotic elements that allowed their fluidity, permanence and grip in the working conditions of the space.. The ink remains in the pressurised capsule in a gel state until friction with the metering ball converts it into a less viscous fluid allowing it to flow out. The inert gas in the capsule also prevents the ink from coming into contact with oxygen in the air, preventing it from oxidising or drying out.
After numerous tests, NASA finally decided to start adopting the “Space Pen” in its space programmes from 1967 onwards and in 1968 they purchased 400 customised units exclusively for the Apollo programme.
In 1969 even the Soviet Union stopped using its grease pencils on plastic slates and bought from the Fisher Pen Company 100 units and 1,000 ink cartridges for the Soyuz missions (and they got the same commercial discount that NASA received for large purchases!).
As a curious anecdote, the use of the Space Pen was not limited to writing alone. It also had a quite different application that surely changed the course of history: One of them occurred during the Apollo 11 mission (the first time a human set foot on the Moon) when the Eagle lander was already resting on the lunar surface and astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were carrying out their scheduled activities. On one of their walks, Aldrin spotted a strange artefact in the lunar dust. When he picked it up, he immediately identified it as the Eagle's mechanical switch that needed to be flipped for the pre-launch procedure to rendezvous with Collins, who was waiting for them in orbit around the Moon. Indeed, there was only one hole left in the switch and it was unusable. It was obvious that it had been inadvertently broken at some point on entry or exit to the module and that they did not notice it because of the bulky spacesuits. At that point an emergency situation began, for without it they could not rejoin the module in orbit and would die on the lunar surface when they ran out of compressed air to breathe. Such was the desperation and sense of disaster that President Nixon's cabinet prepared a speech announcing the death of the astronauts and the failure of the Apollo mission. Creativity thrives when crisis strikes. So at the last moment for the liftoff countdown procedure, Aldrin stuck his Space Pen into the switch hole and managed to trigger it successfully and in time, thus saving the safety and continuation of the mission.
A long time has passed since they were first used and since then, several different Space Pen models have emerged which have been used by both US astronauts and Russian cosmonauts, including unique product lines such as the Shuttle Pen (for crew members on US orbital shuttle missions) and the Mir Pen (for crew members on the Russian space station).
Today, anyone has access to all this space technology and can buy a Space Pen, personalised and at very affordable prices in a multitude of online shops.
