There’s an old, Cold War tale that speaks to the different mindsets and approaches of Soviet and United States engineers as they labored in the trenches of the space race.
It goes like this. The U.S. spent billions of American dollars to fund research on a pen that would write in space. Without the persistent embrace of gravity, you see, ink wouldn’t be pulled down a pen’s internal chamber toward the tip. But astronauts needed to write things down during their limit-stretching missions. So engineers spent all of that U.S. taxpayer money and time and effort to develop a pen that would work in zero gravity. The Soviets, on the other hand, gave their cosmonauts pencils.
This perfect encapsulation of the elegance of simple solutions is, like most perfect stories, a myth. But the reality of the science and engineering behind writing utensils that were up to the task of space scribbling is no less fascinating.
Let’s start in the middle of that story. A 55-year-old pen was sold just this morning at a New York City auction for more than $850,000. This writing implement, a Duro Rocket pen, was used in 1969 by space pioneer Buzz Aldrin during NASA’s Apollo 11 mission to the moon. Presumably, Aldrin used the pen to write as his colleagues, including mission commander Neil Armstrong and command module pilot Michael Collins, navigated to the lunar surface.
But it was what Aldrin did with the pen after he and Armstrong became the first humans to walk on the moon that made the writing utensil truly historic. Upon returning to their lunar lander, the Eagle, after their first moonwalk, Aldrin noticed that a small switch from the control panel and was lying on the floor. That switch, from the lander’s engine-arm circuit breaker, was crucial for getting electricity to the engine that would carry the duo off the moon to rendezvous with Collins, who was piloting the Columbia in lunar orbit. After consulting NASA’s Mission Control back in Houston, and learning that engineers on the ground could not find a way to reroute the power they needed to leave the moon, Aldrin reached into the shoulder pocket of his space suit for the felt-tip pen that he brought along on the mission as a personal effect.
Pressing the pen, which is made of brushed aluminum, against the engine-arm circuit breaker, Aldrin hoped that his brute-force solution would work. After what I have to imagine was a nerve-wracking wait, the astronauts eventually saw that the pen served as a functional temporary switch, and they were able to actuate the engine arm and fire up the ascent engine and leave the moon.
That Duro Rocket pen, despite its understandably steep price tag owing to its unique history, likely cost Aldrin less than $1 when he bought the common office supply in the 1960s. For Apollo 7, a mission that tested the command and service modules with a crew that orbited the Earth for almost 11 days in 1968, NASA was providing its astronauts with slightly more expensive options. The space agency bought 400 Fisher AG-7 Astronaut Space Pens at the discounted price of $6 each. Around the same time, the Soviets purchased 100 Fisher pens and 1,000 ink cartridges for its cosmonauts to use on Soyuz spacecraft.
Read more: “Astronauts as Influencers”
These pens were hermetically sealed and could write in zero gravity thanks to the fact that they were pressurized with nitrogen gas to provide the necessary push to force ink to the tip. These pens were the result of considerable testing and development. And they arrived as the solution to the problem of writing in space after a period of trial and considerable error.
Prior to the Fisher, both the Soviets and NASA used pencils on their space missions. While the Soviets used grease pencils, NASA astronauts participating in Gemini missions in the early 1960s used mechanical pencils made by Houston-based Tycam Engineering Manufacturing. These implements, while they worked in space, came at a price of $128.89 per pencil.
When the complete price tag of $4,382.50 (NASA purchased 34 pencils) became public, NASA decided to go the pen route. Also compelling that decision was the fact that pencils are somewhat of a hazard in the confines of a spacecraft. Aside from the danger posed by broken tips and flaked leads, pencils are flammable, something NASA wanted to avoid after the catastrophic fire that killed three astronauts on the Apollo 1 test mission.
These days, astronauts and cosmonauts alike continue to use Fisher space pens, which come in about 80 models, including an Apollo 11 50th anniversary model and a line of Artemis pens that commemorate the most recent NASA mission, which took astronauts to the far side of the moon for the first time ever.
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Lead image: Ridwan / Adobe Stock
