Quote:
|
Originally Posted by greenman100
US spent millions developing a pressurized pen that wuld write on anything
Russians used a pencil
|
Sorry, but that's not what happened.
Paul Fisher developed the "space pen" on his own (with his, not gov't funds) and
donated several pens to the Apollo missions (previous Mercury and Gemini missions had indeed used pencils) recouping his development money in additional sales (big "space" fad on at the time).
IMHO, the major advantage his pen had wasn't the pressurized cartridge (I think this dates all the way back to Biro - Hungarian? inventor of the ball-point pen) but on using solid ink that was liquefied by the "shear" of the textured ball rotating against it.
I'm pretty sure the pens were used on Russian space missions as well - although they probably had to
buy theirs - and they
might have put the cartridges into Russian-made bodies (complete with "CCCP" emblems) as they were having a space fad at the same time - and competitive feelings ran pretty high.
Now, if you were to compare the radio in a F14 to the radio in a pre-Sukhoi MIG there's be a completely different story in complexity (AFAIK, Russians were late to move from tubes - although I would guess that some of that was simply due to tubes' resistance to EMP - they almost certainly were way behind the US in hardened ICs).