Uploaded November 2021 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
NASA and Lockheed Martin lost about 125 million dollars in late 1999 because of a highly preventable mistake. The Mars Climate Orbiter project was a joint effort between the companies, and the plans appeared to be going smoothly until nine months after launching, when NASA lost contact with the orbiter. It then took the engineers an embarrassing amount of time to understand what had happened.
The unmanned craft reached the red planet on September 23 and executed a 16-minute-and-23-second main engine burn. The plans called for it to establish an orbit around Mars at 150 kilometers, but it was never heard from again when it passed behind Mars.
The crash of the orbiter on Mars was the climax of a series of significant spaceflight failures. Billions of dollars worth of research, military, and communications were wasted or simply left floating around in orbit, completely useless.
A national security review concluded that several of those failures had happened due to an overemphasis on cost-cutting, mismanagement, or poor quality control. But the mistake the engineers made with the Mars Climate Orbiter was so simple it was deemed appalling.
It so happens that the navigation team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory used the metric system, while Lockheed Martin Aeronautics provided crucial data on acceleration in the imperial system. Therefore, JPL engineers mistook the acceleration readings in pound-second for metric newton-seconds.
John Logsdon, the director of George Washington University’s space policy institute, expressed: “That is so dumb.”
NASA officials and Lockheed executives eventually launched an investigation to clarify why no one detected the error during development or during the 9 months that the orbiter traveled 461 million miles towards the neighboring planet.
The orbiter went so off track that it penetrated the Martian atmosphere to a great degree and was destroyed in consequence.
John Pike, space policy director at the Federation of American Scientists, admitted: “I can’t think of another example of this kind of large loss due to English-versus-metric confusion. It is going to be [sic] the cautionary tale until the end of time.”
NASA and Lockheed Martin lost about 125 million dollars in late 1999 because of a highly preventable mistake. The Mars Climate Orbiter project was a joint effort between the companies, and the plans appeared to be going smoothly until nine months after launching, when NASA lost contact with the orbiter. It then took the engineers an embarrassing amount of time to understand what had happened.
The unmanned craft reached the red planet on September 23 and executed a 16-minute-and-23-second main engine burn. The plans called for it to establish an orbit around Mars at 150 kilometers, but it was never heard from again when it passed behind Mars.
The crash of the orbiter on Mars was the climax of a series of significant spaceflight failures. Billions of dollars worth of research, military, and communications were wasted or simply left floating around in orbit, completely useless.
A national security review concluded that several of those failures had happened due to an overemphasis on cost-cutting, mismanagement, or poor quality control. But the mistake the engineers made with the Mars Climate Orbiter was so simple it was deemed appalling.
It so happens that the navigation team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory used the metric system, while Lockheed Martin Aeronautics provided crucial data on acceleration in the imperial system. Therefore, JPL engineers mistook the acceleration readings in pound-second for metric newton-seconds.
John Logsdon, the director of George Washington University’s space policy institute, expressed: “That is so dumb.”
NASA officials and Lockheed executives eventually launched an investigation to clarify why no one detected the error during development or during the 9 months that the orbiter traveled 461 million miles towards the neighboring planet.
The orbiter went so off track that it penetrated the Martian atmosphere to a great degree and was destroyed in consequence.
John Pike, space policy director at the Federation of American Scientists, admitted: “I can’t think of another example of this kind of large loss due to English-versus-metric confusion. It is going to be [sic] the cautionary tale until the end of time.”
