Quote:
Originally posted by Kaltia:
Woo, reminds me of another story I heard: Back in the Space Race the Americans spent billions creating a pen that could write upside down, in water, without gravity etc, because they weren't sure what the effects of non-gravity would be on a pen.
The Russians took a pencil.
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It occurs to me that the Americans might have conciously avoided taking pencils for a very simple reason - pencils have to be sharpened. Flying graphite and wood shavings
could get into vital spacecraft components, and perhaps bridge a switch causing critical malfunctions (such as a retro firing at exactly the wrong time!)
And mechanical pencils have their failings, too. Aside from broken graphite fragments potentially being released, they're still dependant on gravity to a certain extent - to feed new leads into the tip after the old one is used up.
edit> and the russians weren't the most safety concious of the bunch when sending people out into space!
[ 11-17-2002, 01:13 PM: Message edited by: Sir Krustin ]