Xennial Memes
Top caption: "Finally someone tells it like it is. Way too many people have forgotten how awesome NASA is." Two photos show a red Russian Space Pen package printed with a rocket, and a joke text: "When NASA first started sending astronauts into space, they realized that the ball-point pen would not work at zero gravity. A million dollar investment and two years of tests resulted in a pen that could write in space,…

The Space Pen Myth, Busted: NASA Did Not Waste Millions

A Russian Space Pen package carries the old NASA-vs-pencil joke, then a Tumblr-style rebuttal explains graphite fire risks and that Fisher funded the pen himself.

Image description

Top caption: "Finally someone tells it like it is. Way too many people have forgotten how awesome NASA is." Two photos show a red Russian Space Pen package printed with a rocket, and a joke text: "When NASA first started sending astronauts into space, they realized that the ball-point pen would not work at zero gravity. A million dollar investment and two years of tests resulted in a pen that could write in space,…

Comments

No comments yet. Start the thread.

Log in to comment and save favorites.

Tumblr post screenshot. User sapper-in-the-wire: "people today with access to more raw information than any other period: the earth is flat" and "german artilleryman in 1916, who barely washes his own ass: I need to account for the curvature and rotation of the earth when plotting my firing plans". Reblog by thefloatingstone: "Eratosthenes, an Egyptian, in 3750 BC when fucking mammoths hadn't even gone extinct yet:… Photo of the gray lunar surface with a lunar module leg at upper left and a small reflector instrument tilted in the foreground. Caption text: "For me, the most ironic token of that moment in history is the plaque signed by President Richard M. Nixon that Apollo 11 took to the Moon. It reads: 'We came in peace for all mankind.' As the United States was dropping 7.5 megatons of conventional explosives on small… Grid of eighteen minimalist posters, each with a simple icon and a name: Marie Curie, Sally Ride, Rachel Carson, Jane Goodall, Rosalind Franklin, Grace Hopper, Ada Lovelace, Dorothy Hodgkin, Elizabeth Blackwell, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Barbara McClintock, Lise Meitner, Shirley Ann Jackson, Chien-Shiung Wu, Kalpana Chawla, Alice Ball, Flossie Wong-Staal, Maryam Mirzakhani. A half-lit moon on a black background. Pale pink typewriter-style text reads: "The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space - each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision." - Randall Munroe Aerial view of a thick layer of textured white clouds with a thin dark smoke trail rising at a slant, a bright glowing flame at its tip, and a long blue shadow of the trail stretching across the clouds. Blue sky is at the top. No text. Painting of a white space shuttle numbered 9 with an open cargo bay and robotic arm holding a cylinder marked USA, above a curving Earth. A second shuttle numbered 2, a solar-paneled space station, two astronauts and the Moon float in the dark sky. Signed "mccall".

Pick a handle

This is the name shown next to your comments. Your email stays private.