At the height of the space race during the 1960’s, NASA took on the arduous job of finding a way to write in space. Normal pens wouldn’t work due to the zero gravity the astronauts would face in the space capsules. So scientists embarked on a way to solve the problem. They came up with the Astronaut Pen, after months of research and development, and at a cost of about $1 million.

The Soviet Union also faced the task of writing in space. To solve this weighty problem, they used a pencil.