I do love stories about Government spending and how easy it is to just throw large sums of money away.
Anyhow, the story goes that during the initial manned space flights in the 1960’s, NASA discovered that regular ball point pens wouldn’t work under zero gravity conditions.
To try and find a way to overcome this problem, so that astronauts would be able to write in space, NASA spent six years and $2 million, designing a pen that was suitable for use in space.
The pen would work under zero gravity conditions due to the pressurized ink inside. It would also work under sub zero conditions, underwater, on glass and would write on virtually any surface known to man.
The Russians came up with a different solution to the problem and used a pencil.
Image used under a Collective Commons License from https://pixabay.com/photos/space-suit-astronaut-world-earth-2539247/
