1y ago

TIL that NASA lost a $330m Mars Orbiter in 1999, immediately before mars orbit was achieved, because one of the contracted US companies used imperial units instead of metric.

Metric vs Imperial Units: How NASA lost a 327 Million Dollar Mission to Mars

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I think literally every time I had a science teacher want to drill into student's heads the importance of including units in one's physics or chemistry calculations, they brought up this story. I wonder what example they used before this
- None, that's why it happened to NASA.
I coulda swore NASA did account for that and wrote unit conversion subroutines, and that the bug was that a conversion was missed, rather than not knowing the unit mismatch at all
- why don't just use metric??????
  
  You know how much effort would it take for Americans to change their habits? At least a couple of football fields of effort!
  
  What, and open USDM to international competition??
My favorite cautionary tale whenever someone tries to rush a work schedule.
It was because multiple people fucked up by not validating data.
The question is, given the meticulousless of an org like that, how is it multiple units didn't perform data validation?
The project plans and validation steps I've seen for relatively simple, multi-million software deployments would've caught something like this.
Yea, I'm suspicious that this is used an an excuse for another failure.
The US has long required metric for all federal contracts
I remember this on the news as a kid. Oh how I laughed... now as a taxpaying adult - "#$$#@!!!!!"
They will never let that down!
- Live* this down
Wow. What an incredible fuckup.

15 comments