Originally Posted by Rudgey

I read an article about the Kronan, the new production swedish army bike. The founder of the company compared the Kronan to the pencils used by Kosmonauts. The story is, the first astronauts took pens with them to fill out some forms or check some checklists and they discovered that ball point pens don't work in space, so nasa spent 17 million developing a zero gravity pen. The soviets heard about this and thought, oh well we'll just use pencils.