5.01.2006
The Write Stuff
A sharp investigation into the popular tale of NASA's so dubbed billion-dollar space pen -- a die-hard myth that was always at least flimsy enough to scrawl in crow quill on parchment -- yields facts we can now chisel in stone: As Dwayne Dyer reports in The Space Review, the infamous Fisher space pens "never cost a lot of money and were not developed by wasteful bureaucrats or overactive NASA engineers." Take notes.(Space pen story was also debunked here, on Snopes.)
(Personally, I never believed it. But I am convinced, and Dwayne has now confirmed, that Gus Grissom and John Young did fly a brassiere aboard Gemini Titan 3. Which presumably cost NASA nothing; however, for their use of this particular item, back at home the prankster astronauts may or may not have paid dearly.)
