Rob Mayercik
Veteran Member
You're referring to the story of the "space pen" (my mother has one - got it in a promotion they did on a Cheerios box back in the early 80s, has a little shuttle on it and the "TANG" logo). Anyway, NASA didn't develop it, "Fisher" did: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-nasa-spen/The one thing that always pops into my mind was the thousands of dollars spent to develop an ink pen that would work in zero gravity. The Russians used a pencil.
In any event, pencils are bad in space for two reasons:
1. Using them causes graphite dust. Graphite is highly conductive, and you definitely do NOT want something like that floating around in your capsule if you can help it.
2. Pencils are made of wood. Wood burns. Fire Bad (Apollo 1).