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math is hard but at least you probably
have never made a math mistake that cost
her company hundreds of millions of
dollars in damages not everybody can be
so lucky as you though you see back in
1999 NASA tried getting a satellite into
orbit around Mars but it caught on fire
and blew up immediately when it arrived
they traced the problem back to a single
math error that was probably caused by a
small group of people who would all
probably be jealous of whatever the
biggest mistake that you think you've
ever made was but in order to understand
how the math error was made and why it
costs so much money and time we need to
take a history lesson in communist units
also known as the metric system before
the metric system the world was ruled by
chaos and everybody used a different
system for measuring things based on
whatever the hell they felt like
basically but all of that too began to
change in France where the metric system
was first invented in the 1790s when the
people decided to invent a new system
that you know actually made some sense a
guy named Napoleon came around and
started conquering stuff in spreading
the metric system around like it was
some kind of disease Germany and Italy
were both made up of a bunch of
different independent countries at the
time who each used their own different
crazy forms of measuring things and that
was difficult for one simple reason
imagine for a moment that you live in
Bavaria and you need to trade a bag of
potatoes for a pig with some guy in
Prussia you weigh your potatoes in units
of Toyota Corollas well the guy you're
trading with in Prussia not only doesn't
know what the hell that even is but he
also measures things by weighing them in
units of the clay brick that some keying
a hundred years ago decided was the
standard that is confusing and if you
throw in even more weirdos with their
other weird systems of weighing things
you can see how it gets even worse
so trading with people sucks but what if
we could just abandon our own systems
and all just use a brand-new system of
measuring things that we all will have
in common and we'll all have to learn so
it's fair I don't know that sounds like
communism set England but I don't know
that sounds pretty great said Germany
and Italy
who both promptly adopted it after
France and so metric became the hot new
fad across Europe and it spread from
there to all of their colonies which was
basically everywhere France Spain
Portugal Germany Italy the Netherlands
Austria and the Ottomans all adopted
metric in the 19th century but other
countries took a little bit longer
Russia adopted it in 1918 after the
Russian Revolution Japan and China
picked it up in the 1920s in India
picked it up basically right after they
got independence from Britain by the
1960s every country in Europe had
adopted the metric system except for the
United Kingdom and Ireland the
english-speaking world has always been
the slowest community in the world to
adopt metric mostly because we think
that the English invented units of
pounds and inches and yards makes more
sense for some reason and also because
the English invented that system and not
the gross French anyway the UK finally
said fine in 1965 and caved in an
adopted metric Ireland followed suit a
few years later as did New Zealand
Australia and finally Canada in 1973 by
the current year in 2019 every single
country in the entire world except for
three of them have adopted the metric
system and those three are Myanmar
Liberia and the United States which is
the last english-speaking country
holdout that hasn't caved in yet the
metric system has had a rather
complicated history in the United States
the federal government adopted it as the
official system of measurement for the
military and government agencies back in
1975 but the vast majority of people and
private businesses still to this day use
the English customary system and this is
where the history lesson leads us back
to the engineering disaster in 1999 as a
US federal government agency nASA uses
the metric system to conduct all of
their business but as a private business
their subcontractor Lockheed Martin was
still using the customary system NASA
explicitly specified in their contract
that all of their subcontractors had to
convert their measurements into metric
but apparently Lockheed Martin looked at
that and then decided that they wouldn't
Lockheed Martin designed and built the
satellite but they provided NASA
years at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
with data from the onboard thrusters in
units of force in pounds rather than in
the metric mutants the NASA engineers
looked at Lockheed's data for the
thrusters notice that it didn't say
anywhere hey guys
customary units here and so they assumed
that it was all in metric and just
carried on the satellite was launched
without anybody noticing that and after
ten months of traveling and over three
hundred and twenty seven million dollars
being spent on the mission or five
hundred and twenty three million dollars
in today's money more than the combined
annual salaries of nine thousand average
Americans the satellite was destroyed in
a matter of seconds the satellite was
supposed to orbit Mars at a distance of
150 kilometers but because of the
conversion error in the thrusters it
actually descended down to just 57
kilometers above the Martian surface and
proceeded to burn up in the atmosphere
the lesson here is that math is equally
difficult for everyone and even
highly-trained scientists and engineers
at the highest levels of their
professions can sometimes make the
simplest of mistakes that cause
unbelievable amounts of damage the good
news is that there's always a lesson in
a mistake you always learn how not to do
it the next time and true to form NASA
hasn't made a conversion error this
catastrophic ever since so there's no
reason to feel ashamed if math and
engineering are concepts that you want
to be better at but you're struggling
with right now I'm certainly not a
scientist nor an engineer but I am a fan
of both disciplines and I love learning
more about them through courses like
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physics which will teach you everything
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mechanics and how to successfully get a
satellite up into orbit without blowing
it up or you could complete one of
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