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Comment by 77pt77 | Hacker News Reader

That would be communism.

I've actually seen an old ex-NASA engineer claim that.

He was not joking.

What ? They still dont use the meter at NASA ? So they ll drag this silly foot for millions of years if they colonize space ?

I root for the chinese communist to be there first then lol

There is the old joke: “there’s 2 types of countries on this planet - those that use metric and those that put man on the moon.”

I agree, the Liberian space program simply doesn’t get the respect it’s due.

... and pissed away $193M when they missed/crashed into Mars because a US made spacecraft was using metric units while US-ground control was using Imperial (ironic because I thought we fought a Revolution to get out from under the Empire). By the 1990s when that loss occurred, there was no scientific or business reason for the US space program to be using Imperial units: except maybe in press releases that no one read. Generations of machine tools, dies, moulds and instruments have come and gone since the 1970s push for metrification. It's all about as rational as people insisting on only buying incandescent light bulbs. Oh wait.

The primary cause of this discrepancy was that one piece of ground software supplied by Lockheed Martin produced results in a United States customary unit, contrary to its Software Interface Specification (SIS), while a second system, supplied by NASA, expected those results to be in SI units, in accordance with the SIS. . . .

. . . The discrepancy between calculated and measured position, resulting in the discrepancy between desired and actual orbit insertion altitude, had been noticed earlier by at least two navigators, whose concerns were dismissed because they "did not follow the rules about filling out [the] form to document their concerns".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter#Cause_of_...

> whose concerns were dismissed because they "did not follow the rules about filling out [the] form to document their concerns".

Typical government bureaucracy.

Communication within large groups of humans is difficult. I think the examples that NASA provides are enlightening and occur occluded in many places but NASA bares all. Below are examples from the Challenger and Columbia disasters.

It was not the Morton Thiokol engineers who made the decision to go ahead with the ill-fated launch. It was NASA. The engineers, meeting in Utah, communicated two messages from their meeting to their local managers. First, they produced the a formal, abstract result: "With the data available to them, and with NASA knowing as well as they that the design was flawed and that temperature might be a causal factor, the engineers argued that the Challenger ought not to fly so far out of the field database, the firmest evidence available." --Robison, et. al.

https://www.asktog.com/books/challengerExerpt.html

This fourth-level bullet concluding the slide says that, by the way, the debris that struck the Columbia is estimated to be 1920/3 = 640 times larger than data used in the tests of the model! Thus a better headline would be "Review of Test Data Indicates Irrelevance of Two Models." There is an interesting dynamic to this slide: the headline is an exercise in misdirection, which the text then awkwardly and slowly eviscerates.

https://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/pi/2016_2017/phil/...

According to this article[1] they do, but Lockheed Martin uses feet because America! Missiles! Eagles! etc.

[1]: http://www.cnn.com/TECH/space/9909/30/mars.metric.02/

It's even more subtle than that: Lockheed Martin did use metric in the design department that communicated with NASA, but its manufacturing department used imperial units.

I had a friend (in Europe) who worked as a mechanic on Apache helicopters in Afghanistan; all of that is in imperial too. He worked as a contractor so had to provide his own tools, but those are all in imperial and essentially useless outside of the US. So he now has an expensive high-quality useless toolset.

Switching manufacturing from imperial to metric is the real challenge. Nuts, bolt, things that have to fit exactly: it's all very banal, but there's a lot of it and switching it all over isn't easy or cheap.

This was one person who allegedly said that.

I think they do now, but this guy was a retired engineer and he did NOT like the change.

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