A while ago, I heard a story that NASA spent millions developing a pen that would write in a weightless environment while the Russians gave their cosmonauts pencils. It certainly sounded like something a huge bureaucracy would do. Now, I’m hearing that it was all an urban legend. What’s the true story? BTW, I was told the story upon being given a pen that would write upside down, the technology to accomplish this feat having been developed by NASA.
Snopes claims that it’s false.
This has been covered before and isn’t true in the way you heard it. IIRC the Fisher space pen was developed provately and didn’t cost nearly that much. Pencils seem like a low tech solution but they break and need sharpening which causes floating debris, a serious problem.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=133950&highlight=space+pen
I was watching a recent episode of “Rocket Science” on the Learning channel or something like that, one of the astronauts interviewed mentioned the space pen and how it was used on one of the appollo missions to open a switch that had been broken off flush while one of the Astronauts was trying to extricate themselves from their space suits. He also mention that the Russians only got a pencil so???
Damn now I’m going to have to go and search again. I hadn’t believe this story until I’d seen this show which was only in the last few weeks. Maybe NASA didn’t develop the pen. Maybe there’s more to the story than we hear, I don’t know.
I own one of these nifty pens - it’s key features being no breaking parts and the ability to write on nearly anything, grease included, upside down. They accomplish this feat by pressurizing the metal ink cartridge.
It’s inventive, but nothing meriting a million dollars, let alone more than say, 10,000 for R & D.
My WAG.
One of the problems with stories like this is that you have to know how the development cost was computed according to the contract terms.
For example. On many government contracts overhead and general and administrative (G and A) costs can be charged to an item on a uniform basis which means that the total overhead and G and A is divided by the number of items in the contract and that amount is charged to each item. This method probably arose when computing was time-consuming and to proportion such costs according to the value of the item being developed would actually increase the total contract cost because of the bookkeeping involved.
For example, suppose someone has a $100 million contract to develop support equipment for NASA that includes 100 items to be developed. If overhead and G and A are 10% of the total that means each item is charged $100,000 for it. So a simple item that only costs $10,000 winds up with a contract cost of $110,000 which is meat for those who want to make NASA look bad.
[Uncle Leo voice ON]
Take the pen, Jerry. Go ahead, take the pen!
[Uncle Leo voice OFF]
It’s also a myth that you need a pen that is pressurized to work in space. Most cheap ballpoint pens work fine. That is according to thiseuropean astronaut’s journal.
eh? Ball point pens rely on gravity to work.
Then again, I suppose surface tension would work for a while. Shaking the pen might work too. But it wouldn’t be reliable thats for sure.
HIJACK
Very good point. This is also a common explanation for why the military pays $600 for a toilet seat and NASA pays $100 for a hammer.
The contractor says a big job will cost $10,000,000.00 to supply a number of items. Gov’t says contractor must also account for each individual item. Contractor says rent and electricity and heat costs for the facility they’ll use to produce items are included in the $10,000,000. How do we account for these on a part-by-part basis? If you make us do some crazy accounting, it will cost more than $10,000,000. Can we just divide equally? Gov’t says yes.
Politician goes red in the face about a $600 toilet seat.
END HIJACK
All I was saying is that to write upside down for any amount of time and to write on grease it would need to be pressurized ink - and it is! The reason this pen was invented in the first place is because others - not pressurized - have been sent up before and didn’t work according to needs, so i’m not sure where the myth is.
Knighted Vorpal Sword–It wasn’t Uncle Leo. It was Jack Klompus, a neighbor of Morty and Helen’s in Flordia.
Phew, I’m glad I corrected that egregious error. Yes, I have certainly bettered the world with my superior knowledge of sitcom trivia. Indeed, future generations…will never again…make the mistake…of…[Cries inside]
Carry on.
Logically, then, there must be other items listed at less than their proper value, to make up for the $600 hammer and the $1000 toilet seat. Does anyone know of any of the examples of such items?
With present day accounting and inventory practices this is childs play. Each item can show a markup of X% for storage and handling fees based on the % of total dollar value or by volume of space occupied @ cost per unit volume. Pre computer and relational database, yeah it would be a bear.
Paying $500 in storage fees for a toilet seat would be piss poor planning nowadays.
Drach, whos gonna get a CPIM cert someday
Damn beat me to it. I bought myself one of the pens, and every time I see it, I hear Jerry’s mother.
What did you take his pen for?
I don’t understand why you say this. Each item is priced at its cost plus overhead and G & A. So in my example an item that costs $1 million to develop would be priced at $1.1 million. And item, as I said, that costs $10,000 to develop, like a special hammer maybe, would be priced at $110,000.
And of course such account would be simple today. The system, as I said, is probably a holdover from the days when accounting was done on a Marchant calculator.
My little hometown newspaper, The Calvert Moment, used this little urban legend as a filler article about a month ago, and the next week I wrote an article politely pointing out that it was untrue and that all of us should be diligent in looking out for stories like this.
Anyway, as others have said, the space pen was developed ny Paul Fisher of the Fisher Pen Company at a cost of about $2 million of his own company’s money. NASA no doubt spent some of their own money in testing it in outerspace conditions, and ended up buying 400 of them from Fisher at $2.95 each. That’s a pretty good deal for everbody.
Holy cow, that was my 1,000th post!
Though computer packages make the calculation of fixed costs easier, they do not address the fundamental allocations.
We’ll take extreme examples. A supplier is supplying bars of lead and platinum to the pentagon. They are allocating fixed costs by product costs. Politician finds out that the supplier is charging 100x as much on overhead on the platinum, even though it takes the same space and the same handling in the warehouse. Politician goes red in the face because the supplier seems to be price gouging on platinum (compared to the lead).
Supplier learns this lesson and allocates fixed cost based on sqaure feet in the warehouse. Supplier also begins supplying large plastic automobile bumpers. Politician finds out that company is charging much more for cheap bumpers than bars of platinum and goes red in the face.
OK, you can do hybid models, activity based accounting, etc. But these do cost time and money to set it up. But who benefits? Typically, the allocation of overhead does not get sent out to the world – it’s there for the company to decide which products to carry, what price to charge, etc. Customers don’t care. They just want the final price.
The government sometimes does want the numbers, for whatever reason. The simplest allocation is what will cost the government the least money (unless the supplier can reduce his costs by implementing a more complex system on his own). No matter how “good” the allocation scheme, costs will seem out of line depending on how you look at them.
Wait, were we talking about pens?
Yes, there have to be. But finding out that the government gets charged $12,300,321 for a jet engine instead of $12,301,321 isn’t as newsworthy as a $1000 toilet seat.