Did NASA spend millions on developing a space pen?

For decades an urban legend has been circulating the internet, which claims that NASA had a problem with ballpoint pens: They need gravity to work properly, and wouldn't do so in a weightless environment. Therefore NASA spent millions of dollars of taxpayer money to develop a "space pen", a ballpoint pen that would work in space. When the Russian space agency heard of this, they mocked NASA because Russia had a much cheaper solution: They just used pencils.

As always with these urban legends, millions of people believe them, yet they are not true.

In this particular case, it's a mix of distorted facts and fiction.

For starters, both NASA and the Russians used pencils during the first years of space exploration (a fact that in itself just destroys the urban legend). The problem with them is that the graphite in the pencils tends to fly off, which is especially a problem in a weightless environment. It could become a real problem if the graphite head broke, sending a chunk of graphite flying. Even the graphite dust itself could pose all kinds of hazards, as it could interfere with electronics, and is in fact flammable.

Thus there was indeed a real demand for a ballpoint pen that would work in a weightless environment. (The urban legend implies that the people at NASA were just stupid for trying to find a problem that had an easy solution, which was just using a pencil. No, the problem was exactly the reverse: Pencils were used, but they were a potential hazard, and there was a genuine demand for a ballpoint pen that would work in space.)

Did NASA spend millions of dollars to develop such a pen? Again, no. This is a distortion of what actually happened.

Millions were indeed used to developed such a pen, but not by NASA. They were spent by the Fisher Pen Company. Solely at their own. This wasn't commissioned by NASA or anybody. The company did it all on their own.

The Fisher Pen Company did sell some of these pens to NASA eventually (which may be the source of the urban legend). However, they were sold at $2.39 apiece. (Yes, that's 2 dollars and 39 cents apiece. Back in the day a dollar was worth more than today, but not that much.) NASA bought about 200 of them. Hardly a huge expenditure.