The Space Pen Problem

I don’t travel well at the best of times.

By the time I reached seat 40K, found no room in the overhead locker, then realised the in-flight entertainment system wasn’t working, I was already flustered.

By the time I had absorbed the delayed take-off, agonised over the slow progress of the food trolley, tried to ignore the persistent thud of the child behind me, asked for an extra snack bag of roasted peanuts, and reconciled myself to the outrageous cost of slower-than-dial-up Wi-Fi, I was unravelling – and my flight attendant knew me by name.

Deep down, I knew that each of these inconveniences was utterly trivial. Taken together, I lost perspective.

In an effort to regain some semblance of control, I decided to get ahead of the game and complete my arrival card. I have never entirely understood the point of the arrival card. It asks us to solemnly declare that we are not importing livestock, contraband or revolutionary intent into the next country, as if someone planning to do so might be deterred by a small box and a tick. Is this really the last line of defence?

And yet, I find something faintly comforting in this bureaucratic ritual. It’s finite. It’s frictionless thinking. I just needed a pen.

Luckily, I had come prepared. In my travel wallet sat my Fisher Space Pen, resplendent in its shiny chrome casing and pressurised cartridge, designed for zero gravity. It had been a childhood object of desire, impulsively purchased in an airport shop years earlier, and was now far too precious (and pretentious) for everyday use.

I twisted it open, flipped the casing, and began completing the form.

Nothing.

My pen, designed for space, could not function in row 40. The cartridge had gone dry. In time-honoured tradition, I scribbled in widening circles, as if my willpower alone might restore it. It did not.

I sheepishly asked the flight attendant for a pen, and she handed me her biro and, of course, it worked immediately, without any fuss.

The plane landed, and while the inconvenience passed, the moment did not.

Somewhere between Singapore and London, with no screen to keep me entertained, I played back in my mind the original story that had explained my impulsive Space Pen purchase.

A friend had told me, “You know NASA spent millions developing a pen that could write in space,” he said. “While the Russians just took a pencil.”

It was one of those perfect stories that immediately resonated with me. The grand technical solution v The humble tool. Complexity v simplicity. Exuberance v restraint…

There is just one problem.

It is not true.

In fact, in the early years of the space race, both American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts used pencils. The concern was not gravity alone, but also the risk of debris and fire inside the sealed capsules. Those pencils, with their graphite dust and wood shavings, were not exactly the safest things to have drifting around in an oxygen-rich environment.

In 1965, an American inventor, Paul Fisher, developed a pressurised ink cartridge capable of writing in extreme conditions. And after the Apollo 1 fire in 1967 sharpened NASA’s focus on onboard safety, they began purchasing the pens. The Soviets followed soon after, and by 1969, both sides were using the same technology.

The myth survives because it flatters and reassures us that complexity is indulgence and simplicity is virtue. We want that to be true, I think.

Indeed, The Space Pen Problem is not actually about waste; it is about misalignment.

The Space Pen was perfectly rational in space.

But completely unnecessary in economy class.

And organisations, especially schools, are increasingly tempted by the same instinct.

When the stakes feel high, we design for extremes. Our safeguarding must be absolute, our assessment must be defensible, and our documentation must survive scrutiny. Leaders are expected to anticipate risk before it materialises.

So we build systems, successfully I might add, to withstand catastrophe.

We layer policy with protocols and procedures, and we multiply platforms with dashboards that demonstrate control and quality assurance.

None of this is foolish. It is the work of leadership and governance. In genuinely hostile environments, complexity is rational. In orbit, you do not want to reach for a pencil.

But most days in schools are not spent in orbit.

Most days are Tuesday.

A late assignment submission is not organisational collapse. A difficult parent meeting is not a reputational crisis. A temporary dip in data is not necessarily a structural failure. Friction is not the same as fragility.

I think the danger is more subtle. When every system is engineered to survive zero gravity, ordinary gravity begins to feel like failure. The baseline shifts and professional judgement can end up feeling insufficient. Worse, simplicity can be mistaken for irresponsibility.

The Space Pen Problem is the belief that preparedness for the extreme automatically produces effectiveness in the ordinary.

But schools, like most of humanity, operate in gravity. They run on imperfect adults and developing children. They depend on conversation, discretion and trust. They require structure, absolutely, but not every challenge is a launch sequence.

Leadership is so often the discipline of proportion.

Sometimes the simplest tool is enough. So perhaps we need to ask more often:

“Can this be done with a pencil?”

Not because the past was better (let’s not go there today).

But because most days are not zero gravity.

Most days are … Tuesday.