re: Most Americans don't know the answer to this question

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Most Americans don't know the answer to this question

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Click here for this weird trick to keep from losing your pen.

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10 celebrities who have lost pens on the moon. #8 will blow your mind.

While you can try to find a technicality in the question that may change the answer, the only feasible alternative would be (B) Stays where it is, and even then I'm not sure if that is possible. (A) is impossible which makes (D) impossible.

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C) Fall to the surface of the moon

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Gravity, duh

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"The gravity of the moon can be said to be negligible, and also the moon's a vacuum, there is no external force on the pen. Therefore it will float where it is."

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Negligible? The gravitational pull of the moon is what causes the oceans' tides. It is literally pulling the oceans toward it

In fact, the moon's gravitational pull causes the earth to move slightly around a punt that is not the center of the earth.

The moon has no atmosphere and therefore no air resistance. Objects fall at the same rate no matter their weight or shape.

It's hard to imagine but a parachute would not work on the moon. It would never open and even if it were completely open you'd still fall at the same rate as without one.

Apollo 15 to the rescue!

LINK

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Back in the very early days of the American space program, NASA found that the normal ball point pens used on Earth did not write in space because the ink was gravity fed to the point. They spent thousands of dollars developing a pen that the astronauts could use that would write in zero gravity.

The Russians used pencils.

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This isn't even true. Both Americans and Russians initially used pencils, but it was discovered that pencils were potentially dangerous for the reasons that another poster already pointed out.

From Snopes.com:

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The lesson of the infamous "space pen" anecdote about NASA's spending a small fortune to develop a ballpoint pen that astronauts could use in outer space, while completely overlooking the simple and elegant solution adopted by the Soviet space program (give cosmonauts pencils instead), is a valid one: sometimes we expend a great deal of time, effort, and money to create a "high-tech" solution to a problem, when a perfectly good, cheap, and simple answer is right before our eyes.

As good a story and moral as that may be, however, this
anecdote doesn't offer a real-life example of that syndrome.

Both U.S. astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts initially used pencils on space flights, but those writing instruments were not ideal: pencil tips can flake and break off, and having such objects floating around space capsules in near-zero gravity posed a potential harm to astronauts and equipment. (As well, after the fatal Apollo 1 fire in 1967, NASA was anxious to avoid having astronauts carry flammable objects such as pencils onboard with them.)

When the solution of providing astronauts with a ballpoint pen that would work under weightless conditions and extreme temperatures came about, though, it wasn't because NASA had thrown hundreds of thousands of dollars (inflated to $12 billion in the latest iterations of this tale) in research and development money at the problem. The "space pen" that has since become famous through its use by astronauts was developed independently by Paul C. Fisher of the Fisher Pen Co., who spent his own money on the project and, once he perfected his AG-7 "Anti-Gravity" Space Pen, offered it to NASA. After that agency tested and approved the pen's suitability for use in space flights, they purchased a number of the instruments from Fisher for a modest price.

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More about this at Snopes LINK

E, it depends on where you are on the moon. Clearly the aliens on their base may zap it if they think it is a threat.

I doubt that. We used pens because #2 pencils are for poors and Alan Armstrong wasn't going to play for some ghetto team.

Another gigantic reason is America doesn't want to send people on such an insanely dangerous mission.

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Scruffy

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Kip alter?