LogFAQs > #978760909

Did you know that in 1999 NASA lost the $125,000,000 Mars Climate Orbiter after a systems malfunction caused the crafts trajectory to be all wrong and it burned up in The Martian atmosphere.

The cause of the malfunction was because NASA had used the metric system in their components of the spacecraft whilst Lockheed Martin had used Imperial measurements in their components of the spacecraft.

The US needs to go metric or do what Canada and The UK does and use a combination of both

Here in the UK we use imperial measurements for things like speed and distance i.e MPH for speed and miles for distance but use metric for things like liquids i.e we buy things in litres and use the Celsius temperature scale.

It must cost the US companies fortunes to have to convert everything to metric for exporting to other countries whereas they wouldn't have to do that if the US used metric.