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I was six years old the day Neil Armstrong leapt onto the moon. I had just gotten home from school, and it was on the TV. Up 'til then, I had a six-year-old's view of the world; I didn't even know there was a space program. My father took me outside and we stood in the driveway looking at the moon through binoculars. It looked especially close that night. For the longest time after that, I wanted to be an astronaut. I was a teenager when I found out about the training and background the job required, and I stopped thinking about it as a possibility. I knew that even if I acquired the skills and experience, my poor eyesight ruined my chances. So I did the next best thing: I became a professional geek. There aren't many requirements to geekdom, but one of them is written in stone: thou shalt always have a good writing instrument. And preferably more than one, since a single writing tool might fail at a critical moment. I only carry one: the Fisher Space Pen.
The Space Pen has some impressive qualifications. It will write in conditions that would easily kill you: in temperatures from well below freezing to above the boiling point of water, at any angle, even in a vacuum. It was, after all, designed for space travelers. The secret behind the write-at-any-angle feature is the Space Pen's special pressurized ink cartridge. A piston maintains a constant ink flow even when the pen is upside down. This would kill a normal pen, sending the ink squirting out of the tip the moment the cartridge came off the assembly line. The Space Pen gets around this by using a special thixotropic ink. I had to look it up: thixotropy is the property that causes certain gels to become liquid when stirred or shaken. The literature that comes with the pen describes the rubbery ink, which only becomes liquid when it meets the rolling ball in the pen point. What this means is that the Space Pen won't leak in your pocket or purse. It's convenient to carry, too; when not in use its compact bullet-shaped body is under 4 inches long. Did I mention yet that the Space Pen writes underwater? And through oil and grease, on almost any surface? Call me a skeptic, but I filled the bathroom sink full of ice, water and salt to try it. It wrote perfectly on a scrap of wood that I held underwater. It also left faint but visible writing on the smooth sink, which I quickly wiped off before my wife came home and saw it. In the name of science, I also tried writing on a greasy butter wrapper I dug out of the trash. And in some boiling water, holding the very end of the pen to write on the barely-submerged wood scrap. The Space Pen passed with flying colors. In the few years I've had it, the Fisher Space Pen has been the single most reliable writing instrument I've ever owned. It's never skipped, leaked, or failed in any fashion. My wife was so impressed with it that she stole my chrome pen, forcing me to buy a matte black model that looks like something Darth Vader would carry. The Space Pen comes in a range of styles, sizes, and colors. I was a bit disappointed to find out that the astronauts actually used a push button model rather than the sleek bullet that I've come to love. Refills are available in a variety of colors (including red, green, silver, and gold), and you can even get Space Pen cartridges in shapes that fit most standard pens. I couldn't figure out a way to test the pen in a microgravity vacuum, but I saw a story on the Net the other day about how space tourism was a definite possibility in the near future. I can hardly wait. You know what pen I'll be carrying. - Andrew Sasaki [3/11/98] Something to use your Space Pen on:
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