In the white heat of the space race, America spent millions of taxpayer dollars developing a ball-point pen that would work in zero gravity. Confronted with the same problem the Russians used . . . a pencil.
This is, inconveniently, a fairytale. Both sides tried pencils and both sides ended up using the Space Pen, a product developed entirely in the private sector. But the myth often resurfaces as an industrial, geopolitical and ideological parable because it nicely captures the terror that infuses all those fields: that the other company/side/economic model can, and may, be structurally better placed to work smarter and cheaper.
Did the “Space Pen” meme return this week as investors and governments gawped at China’s supposedly low-cost DeepSeek AI model, wondered whether US export controls had backfired, then lost their nerve around the billions invested in the more costly American approach to the same problem? Of course it did.