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In no way is this news or a scoop, but who can resist the tale of plucky cosmonauts calmly relaying such nuggets from a dead-in-the-water space station as:
Savinikh: "We're trying to turn on the light now. Command issued. No reaction, not even one little diode. If only something would light up..."
and
Savinikh: “I’ve gotten the Rodnik schematics. Pump connected. The valves aren’t opening. There’s an icicle sticking out of the air pipe.”
Yep — all the makings of a sci-fi straight to TV movie… icicles hanging out of air pipes indeed!
However, it is not. It is the tale of two cosmonauts sent to try to recover the dead in low earth orbit Salyut 7 back in 1985. The included cosmonaut to earth communication transcripts would be comedy genius had they been scripted, if only as a parody of calm professionalism in a seemingly absurd predicament.
Over to Ars Technica for the piece: http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/09/the-little-known-soviet-mission-to-rescue-a-dead-space-station/
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Wednesday September 17 2014, @08:42PM
I remember reading about NASA's research program to make a pen that could write in zero-G ; each pen cost $10000. The Soviet's used pencils...
(Score: 1) by skine on Wednesday September 17 2014, @09:15PM
No, a private company created these pens on their own, and later marketed them to NASA.
The Soviets adopted space pens soon after the US did. Pencils are really not a good idea when a broken tip or shavings could float into electronic equipment.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 17 2014, @09:51PM
pencil make good patch wire when life support system fail, or latch if door try to fall off
bunch of carbon shaving floating still nice to breathe than air in Russia
if pencil cause problem, hammer fix
pencil very handy tool in space
(Score: 2, Informative) by pTamok on Wednesday September 17 2014, @09:59PM
Correct. the private company is the Fisher Space Pen company http://www.spacepen.com/ [spacepen.com]
More details on the story are in the Wikipedia article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Pen [wikipedia.org]
As the Wikipedia article mentions, before taking up the Space Pen, both the American and Soviet space programmes used pencils, and in addition, the Soviet programme used grease pencils.