NASA Sticking To Imperial Units For Shuttle Replacement

JerryQ sends in a story at New Scientist about the criticism NASA is taking for deciding to use Imperial units in the development of the Constellation program, their project to replace the space shuttle. "The sticking point is that Ares is a shuttle-derived design — it uses solid rocket boosters whose dimensions and technology are based on those currently strapped to either side of the shuttle's giant liquid fuel tank. And the shuttle's 30-year-old specifications, design drawings and software are rooted in pounds and feet rather than newtons and meters. ... NASA recently calculated that converting the relevant drawings, software and documentation to the 'International System' of units (SI) would cost a total of $370 million — almost half the cost of a 2009 shuttle launch, which costs a total of $759 million. 'We found the cost of converting to SI would exceed what we can afford,' says [NASA spokesman Grey Hautaluoma]."

Comments

Re:If you give up the inch, they'll take the mile

[swilver]

You must be forced to use it. Here in Europe we adopted the Euro in a lot of countries, in a very short period the old currency was phased out and the Euro introduced. At first I was converting values as well, but after 2 or 3 years I've switched thinking to Euro's and only ever do a currency conversion when thinking about very old purchases (house, car, previous salary, etc..)

I don't know if it would be similar, but in my opinion it should not be much harder as for example learning to work with say hexadecimal values, or knowing how to express temperature in celsius and fahrenheit.

Re:Oh the Humanity!

[2short]

http://www.snopes.com/history/american/gauge.asp