AI Summary
5 min readA 25-Year-Old Space Pen Still Writes — Here's Why
Michael Stevens brought a sealed Fisher space pen to the studio — a souvenir from his teenage years at space camp in Hutchinson, Kansas — that he had never used in 25 years. The central question was simple: would it still write? It did, immediately, and worked upside down without hesitation. But the real story is why a pressurized pen exists at all, and what it reveals about the difference between a good story and the actual engineering constraints of spaceflight.
Why pencils won't work in orbit
The persistent myth that NASA spent millions developing a space pen while the Soviets simply used pencils is, as Stevens puts it, "not true." Pencils create graphite dust and rubber eraser debris that float in microgravity — conductive particles that can damage electronics and get inhaled by the crew. Sharpening a pencil in orbit would release an enormous amount of particulate pollution into a sealed environment with no floor for debris to settle on.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:03) **The 25-Year-Old Space Pen** - Michael introduces a Fisher Space Pen bought at Space Camp 25 years ago, never used, and the central experiment: will it still write?
- 2 (08:16) **Opening the Vintage Pen** - The pen is unsealed for the first time in ~25 years, showing visible ink gunk at the tip.
- 3 (10:10) **The Experiment: Writing Upside Down** - Hannah performs the test, writing normally and then 180 degrees upside down. The pen works immediately and perfectly.
- 4 (11:18) **The History & Business of the Space Pen** - The backstory of Paul Fisher, who invested his own money (~$1M) to develop the pen, then sold it to NASA for $6 per pen.
- 5 (15:34) **The Pen's Legacy & Time Capsule** - The AG7 and CH4 models are still the official pens on the ISS. Michael decides to put his pen in a time capsule for the year 2100.
- 6 (23:32) **Listener Q&A: Astronaut Orientation** - Lithin asks about internal sense of rotation in deep space.
- 7 (25:49) **Listener Q&A: Why the ISS is Weightless** - Clarification that the ISS is in free-fall, not zero gravity.
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Show Notes
A pen designed to write in space sits unopened for 25 years. Does it still work?
In this episode of Field Notes, Michael Stevens finally opens a treasured souvenir from his time at Space Camp: a genuine Fisher Space Pen that has been waiting decades for its first scribble.
From there, the conversation launches into the challenges of living in space, why astronauts abandoned pencils, and what happens to your sense of direction when gravity disappears.
Along the way they investigate whether eight billion people clapping could damage a building, discover why the ISS is constantly falling towards Earth, and ask whether the Kardashev Scale tells us anything meaningful about the future of civilisation.
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