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A comment on Soviet Moon Mystery Solved By NASA, 50 Years Later. Parent comment

Re:Soviet Moon Mystery Solved By NASA, 50 Years Later by hartror on Thursday April 26, 2012 @07:05AM (#3893269)
Yeah though not as much as that of the Mars Climate Orbiter team who's mission failed due to using imperial rather than metric units in a navigation program.
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Re:Soviet Moon Mystery Solved By NASA, 50 Years Later by maxerickson on Thursday April 26, 2012 @10:05AM (#3893931)
That failure was somewhat more subtle than that. Someone produced a data file with no information about what the numbers in the file meant. Someone else made an assumption about the meaning of the numbers.

Using a single system of measurement would certainly reduce the chance of negative consequences from such sloppiness, but the sloppiness was the problem, not the units used in the data file.

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Re:Soviet Moon Mystery Solved By NASA, 50 Years Later by hartror on Thursday April 26, 2012 @07:16PM (#3896607)
Agreed. Sorry I phrased my comment poorly.
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Re:Soviet Moon Mystery Solved By NASA, 50 Years Later by sp332 on Thursday April 26, 2012 @10:09AM (#3893946)
Or the Genesis spacecraft, which had a sensor designed upside-down and smashed into the desert with the first samples of "solar wind". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_%28spacecraft%29#Misha...
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Re:Soviet Moon Mystery Solved By NASA, 50 Years Later by drzaiusapelord on Thursday April 26, 2012 @09:58AM (#3893885)
In both cases the space agencies had "fly them cheap and often" philosophies, neither of which panned out.
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