How a retractable ballpen became an efficiency tool

AFTER the Space Race (1955-1975) between the two Cold War superpowers — the United States and the USSR — that competed against each another to show their spaceflight capacity, there came an interesting story that won’t go away. It’s how ballpoint pens were used in space and revealed a problem and its solution.

According to scientificamerican.com, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) “scientists realized that pens could not function in space. They needed to figure out another way for the astronauts to write things down. So they spent years and millions of taxpayer dollars to develop a pen that could put ink to paper without gravity. But their crafty Soviet counterparts, so the story goes, simply handed their cosmonauts pencils.