At the height of the Space Race both Soviet and American astronauts faced an unforeseen challenge: taking notes when the lack of gravity rendered normal pens inoperable. The Americans reputedly "spent millions" on an advanced pressurized space pen while the Soviets—they simply brought pencils.

While this anecdote is really designed to illustrate the technical mindset differences between the US And USSR space programs it is based on a true story. The space pen NASA employed during the Apollo program wasn't designed by the government agency but rather the Fisher Space Pen Co. Paul Fisher, the company's founder and inventor of the universal ink refill cartridge, had reportedly sunk more than a million dollars and multiple years developing the "anti-gravity" AG7 pen when he submitted his design for testing in 1966. Two years later, Apollo 7 astronauts carried them into orbit.

The AG7 uitilizes a sealed cartridge filled with gelled ink that liquefies only when exposed to pressure, conveniently provided by another cartridge filled with inert nitrogen gas. The tungsten carbide ballpoint tip prevents interaction between the ink and the surrounding environment, meaning the pen can write upside-down, underwater, in temperatures ranging from -30 to 250 degrees F, and of course, in the weightlessness of space.

The Fisher Space Pen is still being made today, you can pick one up for $50. As for the Russians' Space Pencils, turns out graphite and wood shavings make for an explosive mixture in the cramped, oxygen-rich interiors of orbiters—as the Apollo 1 fire illustrated—and have since been replaced with, what else, the Fisher Space Pen.

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In addition to the above various applications of tungsten and its inorganic, tungsten application development of the organic polymer will open up a wider world for tungsten applications, for example, polymers made from tungsten and the plastic is non-toxic, with the some softness as lead, but higher density than lead and bismuth, which can replace lead in the manufacture of weapons and ammunition, and to reduce damage to the environment.

With the rapid changes in technology, technological advances and new product development, the tungsten will play a more significant role, specifically manifested in the following aspects:

(1)The rapid development of information industry relies on the strong support of high-performance tungsten materials.

(2) The rapid growth and restructuring of steel industry will promote requirements of tungsten for steel rolling and carbide dies for metal products processing tool, as well as the growth demand of special steel.

(3) machinery manufacturing will develop to the precision, numerical control and comprehensive capability directions, which need tungsten products, especially carbide alloy develop to high-grade, small-volume, multi-species directions.

(4) The rapid development of automobile industry, the high-quality, high-grade, high-precision cutting tools, carbide drill needs significant growth, which will also make a substantial increase in car use seismic filament and tungsten contact materials consumption.

(5) Construction and Civil daily necessities in a longer period of time will maintain high-speed growth; the corresponding required of carbide, tungsten alloy and tungsten material will increase simultaneously.

(6) China's great efforts to develop the mining industry, to increase investment in the areas of exploration and mining beneficiation, which means the mining carbide and tungsten products amount will continue to grow.

(7) With the development of the petrochemical industry, tungsten-containing catalyst in petroleum refining and petrochemical industry, especially in the clean gasoline, clean diesel production process development applications will increasingly shows its important role, which means the amount of tungsten will increase.

(8) With the height progress of the electricity energy technology, power transmission needs more tungsten matrix composites and tungsten contacts, nuclear power requires high performance tungsten alloy.

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Anthony Watts has great fun with the predictions of the doomsters over here. He’s picking up on this by economics professor David Mustard. And we can clearly see that those who have been screaming at us for years that we’re just about to run out of minerals are wrong.

But what’s important to understand is why they are wrong. Why, consistently, have all of these projections that we’re about to run out of mineral reserves been so flamingly, aghastly, inaccurate? Fortunately, this is a question to which I have an answer. Indeed, I have the answer. The reason is that these various catastrophists are quite simply ignorant on the matter under discussion.

And the real truth is that every generation does indeed run out of mineral reserves.

No, really, current reserves of copper will be gone soon enough. Current reserves of tin, of tungsten, tantalum, any other metal or mineral you care to think about. All those reserves really will be gone in a generation or not much more than that.
For, and here’s the crucial point, to an acceptable level of accuracy mineral reserves are those ores and minerals that we expect to use in this coming generation.

Watts has this lovely chart showing the results of the Limits to Growth predictions.
we can see, absolutely none of these predictions have come to pass. We haven’t run out of the things we are supposed to have run out of by now.

The usual explanation is that we’ve been in some manner lucky. We’ve just been able to find a few more outcrops of interesting looking rock. We shouldn’t relax though, for we might not continue to get lucky in this manner. There might not be any more interesting rocks to find and then where will we be?

A more sophisticated argument is that as technology changes then the amount of any mineral or metal that we can extract changes. This is most certainly true. For example, the early 1980s deployment of SX-EW technology hugely increased the amount of copper available to us. Before that we could only produce copper metal from deposits of copper sulfides. Now, with it, we could do so from copper oxides. And we knew very well that there were vast mountains of copper oxides out there.

Both arguments have a truth to them. And it is most certainly true that there is some absolute limit to the number of atoms of this or that on the planet. Beyond which we really would be truly stuffed.

We could also become economists and thus begin to understand that everything, but just everything, is substituitable. For example, that copper that we’ve not been running out of. We can use it for telephone wiring or for pipes for water. And we can use fibre optic cable for the telephone cables and thus have more copper to use for the water pipes.

And again, there’s a great deal of truth in this argument.

However, while it is indeed true that the catastrophists have misunderstood these various points, that’s not actually the real reason they’ve been so consistently wrong. That real reason is that they’ve all been seemingly ignorant of what the phrase “mineral reserve” actually means.

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The ammonium metatungstate and heteropoly tungstic acid are mainly used as a catalyst in the petrochemical and organic synthesis. 

Sodium tungstate is used for the production of certain types of paints and pigments, in addition also be used for metal tungsten, tungstic acid and tungstate manufacture and dyes, pigments, inks, and electroplating. Tungstic acid is mordant dyes, in the textile industry, in the chemical industry is used as a catalyst for preparation of high-octane gasoline. Tungsten disulfide in organic synthesis, such as in the preparation of synthetic gasoline was used as a solid lubricant and a catalyst.

Based on the superiority of the tungsten and its compounds, tungsten occupies an important position in the field of national defense. In the military industry, the pressure – resistant and heating – resisting parts which would contact with gunpowder, like the guns, cannons, tanks and other weapons and equipments, are produced by tungsten steel. The aviation jet engine's combustion chamber, fuel nozzles, turbine guide vane, turbine rotor blades are all made of tungsten alloy; The skin materials of rockets, missiles and satellites are tungsten-containing high-temperature resistance alloy; penetrators heads made of high-density tungsten alloy, can improve the performance of the shells; gyroscopes are the heart of aircraft, naval vessels and rocket's navigation and control system, gyro inertial elements made of high-density tungsten alloy, can improve the stability and control precision of the instruments, such as the aircraft's ailerons, rudder and horizontal tail, etc. are required counterweight to balance. In some aircraft, hundreds of kilograms high density tungsten alloy is used for counterweight; tungsten alloy material has a very important significance to the development of modern aerospace, aviation and maritime industry.

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