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One Calculator or One $330 Million Mistake

The United States is one of the only countries in the world to avoid the conversion from using its traditional measuring system (known simply as American or customary) to using the metric system in daily life.  Despite the fact that the ultimate bases for our measurements are metric values, Americans persist in measuring everything in feet, gallons, and pounds rather than meters, liters, and kilograms. When we travel, Americans tend to be a bit baffled when they see 100 km/hour road signs or price tags on groceries made out in kilograms or liters. Plenty of people require some easy way to switch between units so they can use the metric system in order to deal with other people and cultures but still understand the measurements by converting them to their own system. With the 1-Step Metric Conversion Calculator, those troubles are forever in the past.

Every few years there is some grumbling from an economist claiming that Americans’ unique measuring system costs its people and corporations in terms of global economic competitiveness in business, finance, manufacturing, and other industries. While some of these charges are spurious and some are more credible, using the American system has cost us in very tangible, quantifiable ways, and the sad thing is it could have all been averted by using a metric calculator. Few people remember, but 12 years ago this bucking of international norms cost the US government and its space agency NASA to the tune of around $330 million and years of work.

Back in 1998, NASA had a program called Surveyor in which a couple of spacecraft around Mars would collect data about Martian climate and weather. The mission had two main parts, the Mars Polar Lander and the Mars Climate Orbiter, which together added up to an ambitious project to study Mars’ atmosphere and weather conditions. The trouble came when it was time for the program’s contractors to build all of the parts to make up the Orbiter. Lockheed Martin was the contractor on the Orbiter’s thrusters, which would allow the craft to enter orbit at the correct altitude, and they made the relatively simple yet ultimately inexcusable mistake of assuming that a large-scale scientific project, one planning on taking precise measurements of a cosmological and meteorological nature, would use the American system of measurement in its computer programming.

Instead of entering orbit at 140-150 km above Mars, the Orbiter came into orbit at around 57 km and was destroyed by the stresses encountered in the atmosphere. Considering the scientific meaninglessness of the units in the American system and the fact that virtually all science, including rocket science, is conducted in metric units, the Mars Climate Orbiter disaster remains one of the costliest scientific mistakes in recent human history. It is funny to think that if one engineer at Lockheed had noticed the mistake and make a quick conversion of his unit measurements using a metric calculator, American taxpayers wouldn’t have been out $330 million and we would have all the useful scientific information we could have expected to gain from the Mars Surveyor program.