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NASA used metric, it was a contractor that fucked up the conversion on their piece which they decided to do in US units for some reason
Lockheed is the company that fucked up by using US customary, for any curious.
When you watch a ULA launch stream and they talk about how many nautical miles in altitude they are it’s just so fuckin embarrassing
Fun fact:
Internally they switch between imperial and metric all the time. The broadcast is in imperial for US viewers.
Sauce: once upon a time I worked there
I still don’t understand nautical miles. Everyone knows regular miles. Or even feet, that’s what Blue Origin does because it’s relative to aircraft altitude that people might know. But nautical miles? I don’t get it.
It’s a space ship I guess. I have a fondness for sci-fi that uses naval conventions because that’s probably how things will end up going, because tradition takes priority over utility.
even worse, Americans cant even get a pint right and will short you 4oz
I like how it just devolved from metric vs imperial to imperial vs imperial
Then ask for a tip…
I consider myself a fairly “progressive and open minded American”. I have even paid lip service to the superiority of the metric system.
But I can say with sincerity, this is the first thing that has ever made me truly care about metric vs imperial… or conversions in general.
They’re both imperial though. The Brits are fucking weird. They act like they use metric, but they swap between them like crazy. The US and British have different versions of several measurements with the same name though. If you look into the history of the measurements, some of them get insane with dozens of different potential values.
If your flight computer can’t count that high You will not go to space today
Good thing Trump is ending the only metric highway in the USA despite pleas from locals.
Technically the ISS isn’t NASA and it has happened to them as well.
To be fair, an Ariane 5 rocket failed because of a float being treated as a double, or something similar. I don’t remember the details, but what makes it embarrassing is that it was the result of recycling code from Ariane 4.
I don’t think recycling code is embarrassing? No-one can be expected to write a new codebase from scratch for every new product or machine. That would be worse than building on top of a solid foundation.
It isn’t. Never testing that it’s compatible with the new hardware platform is.
Having read up on it quickly, the real issue was with a lack of tests and failure handling, so you’re not wrong.
Apparently this code wasn’t even necessary to run after liftoff, yet it caused the self-destruct.
Crazy.
