think simple

This is a story shared by my company's Executive Director yesterday. Very interesting though some of you might have had read before.

" Back when NASA started launching manned spacecraft in the 1960s, they found out that the astronauts couldn’t use pens to write with while in space. The ink wouldn’t flow down through the pen in a zero-gravity environment. NASA decided to retain a man named Paul Fisher to design a pen that would work in space. A mere $1.5 million later, they had a solution. NASA now had a pen that worked in zero gravity, in a vacuum, and in a drastic temperature range. The Russian cosmonauts had the same problem, of course. So they used a pencil. "

According to what is written below, it seems like the story was exaggerated. Which is true? I don't know. This is just what I found on the net.

Now, this anecdote isn’t historically accurate, and has become a bit of an urban legend. The truth is both the US and Russia used pencils at first, and Paul Fisher independently created the pen and sold 400 of them to NASA for a song. The reason the exaggerated story is so widely embraced, though, is because it rings true.

Moral of the Story:
We often expend large amounts of time and effort creating elaborate solutions to problems when a simple answer is right under our noses.