Sweet Home Scissors Await Space Launch
Oregon Business/September 1990

National Aeronautics and Space Administration Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center Houston, Texas 77058 Dear Mr. Gallogly, I would like to thank you for the help and cooperation you gave me concerning your company's scissors. Your Slip-N-Snip Scissors will be a part of the In-flight Blood Collection System (IBCS) for the Spacelab Life Sciences-1 (SLS-1) mission. SLS-1 is the primary payload for mission STS-40, scheduled to launch August 29, 1990. Scissors are needed as part of IBCS and Slip-N-Snip has been chosen to fill this requirement. Sincerely, Angelene M. Lee

For Don Gallogly of Sweet Home, it's been a tough summer. But he expects to get a real lift this fall.

Gallogly is the owner of the Slip-N-Snip Scissors, Inc. of Sweet Home, which produces what Gallogly says are "the original folding scissors."

Gallogly had expected they would have also been the first folding scissors in space by now. But this summer's delayed space shuttle launches - caused by problems in the fuel system - have postponed the mission that will use the Slip-N-Snip Scissors until this fall, assuming there aren't further problems.

The company was founded in 1971, and Gallogly purchased it a couple of years ago. The company, which employs ten people, produces 220,000 to 250,000 pairs of scissors a year. They typically retail for $5 to $6 each.

A major use of the scissors is in sewing, although they are made of such tough metal - produced by an American company - that they can cut metal, thus giving them a wide variety of uses. They are sold throughout the United States and in some foreign countries.

For some time now, the company has been battling competition from cheaper foreign imports, some of which have illegally copied Slip-N-Snip's patents and all of which are made of cheap metal and tend to break easily, Gallogly said.

To deal with this problem, Gallogly has moved up-market, positioning his product as the state of the art folding scissors. He expects the use of the folding scissors on a space shuttle will provide a major boost to that image.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) purchased scissors for the Spacelab Life Sciences (SLS) mission. The scissors will be part of the SLS blood collection kit, along with syringes, gauze, and blood tubes. The SLS will fit into the cargo bay of the shuttle and be joined to the crew cabin via a connecting tunnel. The SLS experiments will required metabolic data from the crew throughout the flight, including frequent blood samples.

The Slip-N-Snip Scissors fold so that no point protrude. "You wouldn't want regular scissors floating around in weightlessness where they could poke somebody in the eye," Gallogly said.

The way Gallogly's scissors ended up on the mission is an interesting tale. NASA official Angelene Lee was searching for dependable equipment for the SLS and mentioned to her mother she needed some good scissors. Her mother happened to have a pair of Slip-N-Snip scissors in her sewing kit and told her daughter about them.