by Chris Peterson » Fri Jan 15, 2016 4:55 pm
MarkBour wrote:neufer wrote:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter wrote:
<<The Mars Climate Orbiter (formerly the Mars Surveyor '98 Orbiter) was ... lost as the spacecraft went into orbital insertion, due to ground-based computer software which produced output in non-SI units of pound-seconds (lbf s) instead of the metric units of newton-seconds (N s) specified in the contract. The cost of the mission was $327.6 million total for the orbiter and lander, comprising $193.1 million for spacecraft development, $91.7 million for launching it, & $42.8 million for mission operations.>>
As bad as throwing away $ 327 million is, that cost pales by comparison to the cost to generations of young American students, and also to our international relations and reputations. We actually take our kids in grade school, do a lame job of familiarizing them with SI units, and call this lost time "science education". Indeed, to a young mind, learning meters and kilograms is initially somewhat equated with science. Meanwhile, students in the rest of the world are getting down to actual material, and understanding it more for what it really is. To some extent, we are making ourselves the outsiders, the foreigners, in a science laboratory.
To be fair, the actual "loss" was much less than the total mission cost, since much of the money went into technology development (which was not lost) and human and capital costs (which were not lost). And while it's a travesty that the U.S. does not adopt the SI system and teach it as primary units in school, the failure in this case was only peripherally related, since the people involved were certainly all very comfortable with SI units and used them for most things. There are simply a few areas where conventions hold, and this was one of them. Even in countries that are officially SI, there are pockets of usage that are not SI.
[quote="MarkBour"][quote="neufer"]
[quote=" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter"]
<<The Mars Climate Orbiter (formerly the Mars Surveyor '98 Orbiter) was ... lost as the spacecraft went into orbital insertion, due to ground-based computer software which produced output in non-SI units of pound-seconds (lbf s) instead of the metric units of newton-seconds (N s) specified in the contract. The cost of the mission was $327.6 million total for the orbiter and lander, comprising $193.1 million for spacecraft development, $91.7 million for launching it, & $42.8 million for mission operations.>>[/quote][/quote]
As bad as throwing away $ 327 million is, that cost pales by comparison to the cost to generations of young American students, and also to our international relations and reputations. We actually take our kids in grade school, do a lame job of familiarizing them with SI units, and call this lost time "science education". Indeed, to a young mind, learning meters and kilograms is initially somewhat equated with science. Meanwhile, students in the rest of the world are getting down to actual material, and understanding it more for what it really is. To some extent, we are making ourselves the outsiders, the foreigners, in a science laboratory.[/quote]
To be fair, the actual "loss" was much less than the total mission cost, since much of the money went into technology development (which was not lost) and human and capital costs (which were not lost). And while it's a travesty that the U.S. does not adopt the SI system and teach it as primary units in school, the failure in this case was only peripherally related, since the people involved were certainly all very comfortable with SI units and used them for most things. There are simply a few areas where conventions hold, and this was one of them. Even in countries that are officially SI, there are pockets of usage that are not SI.