An illustration of a pencil by John LeMasney
An illustration of a pencil by John LeMasney.
This sketch reminds me of the story of the space pen, in which it’s suggested that the US was wasteful in spending a million dollars to develop a space pen, while Russians simply used pencils. A great story, but false on many counts:
“The lesson of the infamous “space pen” anecdote about NASA’s spending a small fortune to develop a ballpoint pen that astronauts could use in outer space, while completely overlooking the simple and elegant solution adopted by the Soviet space program (give cosmonauts pencils instead), is a valid one: sometimes we expend a great deal of time, effort, and money to create a “high-tech” solution to a problem, when a perfectly good, cheap, and simple answer is right before our eyes. As good a story and moral as that may be, however, this anecdote doesn’t offer a real-life example of that syndrome. Both U.S. astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts initially used pencils on space flights, but those writing instruments were not ideal: pencil tips can flake and break off, and having such objects floating around space capsules in near-zero gravity posed a potential harm to astronauts and equipment. (As well, after the fatal Apollo 1 fire in 1967, NASA was anxious to avoid having astronauts carry flammable objects such as pencils onboard with them.)”
– snopes.com: NASA Space Pen –
This drawing was made by John LeMasney in Krita, the open source digital painting application.
This content is published under the Attribution 3.0 Unported license.