Reminds me of when America spent millions of dollars inventing the ballpoint pen so astronauts could write in space. Russians used a pencil.

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GuestFAUniverse a day ago | parent | next [-]

Everybody keeps repeating that story.

Seldomly people understand the disadvantage of graphite dust that gets distributed in a capsule.

Plus, my experience: we had to use pencils during military service. And after the shitty results (barely readable due to low contrast, sometimes no visible stroke on wet paper), I organized myself a ballpoint that worked flawlessly in wet conditions.

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onion2k a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The USA and Russia used pencils in the early space missions. They stopped because broken pencil points would mean they'd have graphite floating around, which is electrically conductive, and got sucked into the ventilation systems resulting in electrical shorts and fires.

After the Apollo 1 fire Fisher invented the space pen and sold it to both the USA and Russia.

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pseudohadamard 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Which is why one of the best books on the history of Russian spaceflight is called "The Wrong Stuff". It covers in great detail how not to run a space program.

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drysine 18 hours ago | parent [-]

Never heard of it before. Who exactly calls it "one of the best" besides you?

Here is a review from the National Space Society:

"As the title suggests, the book is extremely negative in tone and hostile to the entire Soviet space effort, from top to bottom. The book portrays the Soviets as bumblers and fools, veering from catastrophe to disaster. Soviet space successes (including the first manned spaceflight, the first flight of a female Cosmonaut, and other missions) are treated as lucky breaks or close calls, and nothing more. While some may find this fun or amusing, it has little basis in reality. The Soviet space program was a monumental undertaking that, like the U.S. space program, demanded the service of the nation’s top engineers, manufacturers, pilots, etc. Many books, including Colin Burgess’s outstanding Soviets in Space, James Harford’s Korolev, William Burrough’s This New Ocean, and other works all portray the Soviet effort in a much more realistic manner and demonstrate what a massive and serious effort it was. Even Bryan Burrough’s Dragonfly, which is highly critical of the Russians and details more than a few life-threatening misadventures aboard the Mir Space Station, does not portray the Russians as clods the way that Strausbaugh does. ...

The problem is that one could just as easily write a similar book, with a similar tone, about the U.S. space program. The loss of the Mercury capsule during Gus Grissom’s Liberty Bell 7 flight, the Apollo 1 fire that claimed the lives of three U.S. astronauts, Gene Cernan and Dick Gordon’s deeply troubled spacewalks on Gemini 9A and Gemini 11, respectively, as well as the Challenger and Columbia disasters could be described in the same manner and it would be just as unfair and disingenuous."

[0] https://nss.org/book-review-the-wrong-stuff/

	▲	pseudohadamard 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Great, you've managed to dig up a negative review. Have a biscuit. Here's 286-odd reviews that disagree with that one: https://www.amazon.com.au/Wrong-Stuff-Soviet-Program-Crashed...