For decades this has been brought up to criticize wasteful spending, inaccurately. Fisher Price didn’t even develop the pen for NASA, it was just a sales gimmick, and NASA didn’t spend thousands of dollars on them. Space flight was getting a lot of publicity back then, so products that related themselves to space were popular, like Space Food Sticks - tootsie-rollish snacks supposedly full of protein and nourishment. To me they tasted too much like raw flour. “Energy” of course was a euphemism for sugar.

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