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After a little googling, I found this (scroll down the page a bit to find the explaination) which explains a little more about it.

Separate link, which I can't verify, but here it is--Anatoly Solovyev quote

Apple Version
Microsoft Version
Eric S Raymond Version

My favourite pens are the Rotring Trio series. Look here.

The Trio 600 Multipen is a machined hunk of brass and aluminum. It has a really impressive heft, and feels good in my hand. It's a big, heavy pen, but I like it a lot. One of the two inks can be replaced with a stylus point, and the pencil is a .7mm lead which I find is a bit more durable. (I write rough.)

The Quattro Executive is also a great pen. I carry mine with two colors of ink, and a stylus point, along with the .5mm pencil. I use the Fisher Space Pen refills in all my multipens, which I found here.
The regular Quattro is not nearly as well made as the other pens. It's also very light and rattly. I don't care for it at all.

I once owned a Yafa trio pen that was similar in appearance to the Rotring 600, but it wasn't nearly as hefty, and it was rattly like the Quattro.

I guess they did because even now you can buy them, and people know exactly what you mean when you say "space pen".

I've never used one, I'm a lefty and I use generic ball point pens for the majority of my writing, and a traditional pencil for the rest.

To be honest I write so infrequently that the quality of the implement has been irrelevent - even the fiction I write is always produced on a computer, or a typewriter if I'm feeling baroque!

I notice that the space pens are a lot more expensive now. But still cheaper than the $450 pens mentioned above!

The most I've ever paid for a pen has been around 20 UK pounds - the thought of paying a few hundred for something I'd rarely use, and probably lose scares me!

When you think that NASA spent countless $$$ to come up with a pen that would work in space (in a zero grav environment) to come up with a very expensive system (involving ink being put under pression) where each pen would cost over $10,000.

When the obvious solution (used by the Russians) was to use a pencil...

The American's spent tens of thousands of dollars to come up with a pen that would work in the harsh enviroment of outer space: zero-g, temperature changes, uv rays, etc.

The Russians used a pencil. :)

you mean the fisher space pen - AG7, designed to work in zero-g environments. Well may the Russians have used pencils but NASA had these pens for good reasons. Using pencils would result in the astronauts breathing in fine graphite particles :)

Also heres an article describing how Buzz Aldrin used his pen to fire the LM engines to get off the moon.

http://www.thewritersedge.com/story.main.cfm

• until the "space pen" was privately develope

Privately developed, now used by Cosmonauts as well, plus it was instrumental in getting Armstrong and Aldrin off of the moon when a switch snapped on the lander. Apparently. ;-)

After all, NASA spent thousands to get an ink pen to write in space. The Russians used a pencil...

[Spider Robinson story about space pen replacing switch snipped; read it at the Official Space Pen website. For the record, there's no mention of this incident in the exemplary resource Apollo Lunar Surface Journal.]

In the rest of his article, Spider uses the space pen, and other by-products of space-race research, to justify the support of basic research by government in the face of opposition from pork-barrelling politicians like Senator Socksdryer.

But the Space Pen was developed entirely by private enterprise. Fisher does claim that they spent $2 million (in 1960s dollars? doesn't say) to develop the pen, but we can assume those development costs have been repaid many times over.

Also, many Russian cosmonauts now use the Space Pen; and American astronauts have used a variety of writing implements, generally chosen by the astronauts themselves. The ALSJ does relate one mention of the Space Pen: Aldrin says he had a felt-tip pen that put out more ink than the Fisher pen.

The space pen is neither an example of government procurement gone mad, nor an example of return on investment, except for the Fisher company.

The original Spider Robinson article. Despite the attribution to Aldrin, I believe we have to take this one with a grain of salt. The Apollo 11 mission has been very closely studied for a generation.
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Actually, they don't, and haven't for some time. This is an old myth that's trotted out anytime someone brings up the Space Pen, but the Russians use it too. Here's a link that both talks about the Apollo 11 story and shows Russian cosmonauts with the pens:

Apollo 11 Space Pen Story

I've heard (although this is unverified) that the problem with the pencils was graphite dust getting into the machinery--or at least the potential for it.

The one I'm thinking of is the Fantazein clock. The animated image on that page gives a pretty good rendition of the way the clock behaves in real life. It has a strip of LEDs mounted on a metronome-like arm that moves back and forth fast enough that you don't see the arm, so the numbers appear to float in space.

Ah, but you forget the power of Wacky American Ingenuity.

From what I understand, all they did was pressurize the ink to keep it flowing in zero-G.

On a side note, and this may be an urban legend, but it apparently cost millions of taxpayer dollars to design and fabricate this pen that would write in space (first flown in 1967). The Russians just used pencils.

It's not an urban legend. According to this story it cost 2 million dollars to develop this pen, in mid 1960's. If you translate that to today's money that got to be at least 20 million dollars.