The Space Pen That Saved Apollo 11
Required gear: Balls of Steel and a Pen
There’s this joke I remember from when I was young, it goes:
When NASA first started sending astronauts into space, they realized ballpoint pens wouldn’t work. NASA scientists spent a decade and billions of dollars to make a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside down, underwater, and on any surface in temperatures ranging from below freezing to up to 300 degrees Celsius. The Russians used a pencil.
It’s a pretty good joke but then as I got older I found out it was more of an urban legend and, turns out, that the space pen actually made space missions safer and a pen saved Apollo 11. So let’s debunk that legend and find out just how instrumental pens really were for space and beyond.
Today we’re looking at how losing a presidential nomination led to the invention of a space pen and how pens ended up saving the moon landing mission.
The 1960 Presidential Election
Let’s start this story in 1960, the innovative and ambitious Paul C. Fisher is testing the waters, attempting to cinch a democratic party nomination in the primaries for the President of the United States. One of his opponents is John F. Kennedy, so I think we all know Paul doesn’t get too far.
Oh well, he’ll just have to go back to his company, at the time called The Fisher Pen Company, and keep innovating. By 1960 he had already made a name for himself and his company by introducing the “Universal Refill Cartridge” in 1953 and now he was going to move on to another problem that plagues pens; leakage.
JFK and The Space Race
In the meantime, John F. Kennedy wins the Democratic primary and the presidential election. He takes over as president in 1961 amid a cold war with Russia and surprisingly aims to dismantle the space program.
Kennedy had been opposed to the cost of going to space when he was a senator and his opinions didn’t change as president, even after Russia’s successful launch of their space satellite, Sputnik 1, in 1957.
It wasn’t until Russia sent the first human to outer space, Yuri Gagarin, on April 12th, 1961 that Kennedy had a change of heart. By May he was all on board with, not just a space mission, but a moon mission by the end of a decade. When all the world’s a stage, global competition makes you a main character.
“And if they keep testing me, I’ll shove my foot up their Uranus!”
The Making of the Space Pen
In September of 1962, Kennedy makes his now famous “Man on the Moon” speech, which I’m guessing Paul Fisher missed out of spite, since it wasn’t him making that speech or because he was too busy investing one million dollars in making his pen.
Yea, that’s a lot of money, that's almost 9 million in today’s money but see in order to make a non-leaking pen it had to basically be a non-gravity pen. In order to achieve this, Fischer had to basically invent a new type of ink, called thixotropic ink meaning it would stay in a gel-like state until there was pressure applied then turn to liquid.
When not in use, the ink returns to its gel-like state. The ink was put into an airtight seal with a cartridge of nitrogen alongside it, the nitrogen pushes out the ink as opposed to gravity.
All of that just to make a pen that doesn’t leak ink.
The Dangers of Using A Pencil in Space
Finally, in 1966 Paul unveils his Anti-Gravity pen which despite the name doesn’t exactly fly so that’s a letdown. But at the same time, NASA was dealing with a few problems, they were preparing for the moon and they needed to ensure as little could go wrong as possible.
A big piece of that was making sure nothing could catch on fire. For years they have been using pencils for their missions, specifically mechanical pencils since wood pencils could cause all sorts of problems seeing as how wood has that strange flammable quality to it.
The mechanical pencils, while less flammable, weren’t exactly one hundred percent safe. The lead was made of graphite, which would create dust that had the unfortunate ability to conduct electricity. And when you’re in a pressurized oxygen-rich container heading 239 thousand miles away towards the moon, you don’t want to risk any sparks.
The Price of Technology
Another problem NASA was facing was the cost of these mechanical pencils, word got out they were paying $128 per pencil which is over a thousand dollars in today’s money... for a pencil, a freaking pencil.
And that’s a heavy price to pay for a pencil, they need something that was lighter on their wallets… maybe something that was so light... it was anti-gravity? Ba dum tshh!
NASA put out a request for specialty pens to bring to space, and Paul Fisher answered with his new anti-gravity pens. And after a lot of testing in 1967, NASA chose his anti-gravity pens to bring to space.
And I’m imagining when they asked what the price of each pen would be they held their collective purses tightly but Fisher was willing to give them a 40 percent discount, each pen costing only $6 dollars.
One Small Step
On July 16, 1969 (nice), Apollo 11 launched on its way to the moon to make history with astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Now you might think this is where the pen story ends but you’d be wrong. The first men on the moon were about to have much bigger problems that only a pen could solve.
At some point during their history-making moonwalk, one of the two bumped the switchboard with all these pretty important circuit switches. When they returned, Buzz Aldrin found the broken switch and it turned out it belonged to a VERY important switch, the ascent engine. Without it, they weren’t getting off of the moon.
They let NASA know of the problem along with probably yelling at them for having spent thousands of dollars on mechanical pencils years before but never thinking of shelling out 5 dollars for a hard plastic cover over the switches.
The Pen is Mightier
Seeing as how we’re talking about how important pens were in the moon mission you can probably guess what happened next, but if you guess that fancy fisher pen saved the day you’re wrong. Aldrin thought about it but seeing as how there was electricity running behind that circuit board and remembering that the pen is metal, he figured mixing the two would be a bad idea.
But then Aldrin remembered that he also brought another pen on the mission, a felt-tipped pen from the Duro Pen Company. He liked the way it writes and as someone who writes all day, I can’t blame him. But the best thing about this pen was the non-conductive plastic tip. He stuck it in there and saved the day.
Capitalism
After this both the Duro Pen Company and The Fisher Pen Company capitalized on the publicity, Duro Pen Company re-released their felt-tipped pen, calling it the “Rocket QB2 Astronaut Marker” and the Fisher Pen Company renamed their pen as the “Space Pen” and eventually also renamed the company to the Fisher Space Pen Company.
So some capitalized a bit more than others. In the end had Paul Fisher not lost that election in 1960 and Buzz Aldrin not been a fan of felt-tipped pens, history would be a lot different. Oh, and by the way that joke from the beginning? Obviously, NASA spent far less on the pens and weren’t even involved in its creation.
And as for the Russians? They also purchased Fisher’s space pens… and, got a discount too.
