Embedded Files
NASA lost a $125 million satellite, because of what CNN referred to as a “metric mishap
When calculating coordinates of a communication station, Engineers at Lockheed Martin used the imperial system, while NASA used the metric system. This mistake caused the Mars orbiter to miss its mark. It’s a common struggle to compete between measuring systems. In this case, a small mathematical error proved to be the orbiter’s undoing as NASA lost contact with the probe, , and its engine burned up and vanished over the planet in 1999.
NASA lost equipment worth millions thanks to shoddy conversion practices. SOHO, the Solar Heliospheric Observatory, a joint project between NASA and the ESA (European Space Agency), lost all communications with Earth. After about a week of trying various things, communication was restored and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Among the problems thought to have caused the sudden blackout:
• There was an error in the spacecraft’s navigation measurements of nearly 100 km, which resulted in a much lower altitude than expected and led to the vehicle’s break-up in the atmosphere.
• The conversion factor from English to Metric units was erroneously left out of the AMD files.
• Interface Specification required that the impulse-bit calculations should be done using Metric Units.
An aircraft more than 30,000 pounds overweight is certainly no laughing matter. In 1994, the FAA received an anonymous tip that an American International Airways (now Kalitta Air, a cargo airline) flight had landed 15 tons heavier than it should have. The FAA investigated and discovered that the problem was in a kilogram-to-pounds conversion (or lack thereof).
In 1983, an Air Canada flight ran out of fuel above Gimli, Manitoba. Canada had switched to the metric system in 1970, and the plane is reported to have been Air Canada's first aircraft to use metric measurements. The plane's on-board fuel gauge was not working, so the crew used measuring "dripsticks" to check how much fuel the plane took on during refuelling. Things went wrong when they converted this measurement of volume into one of weight. They got the number right, but the unit wrong - mistaking pounds of fuel for kilograms. As a result the plane was carrying about half as much fuel as they thought. Luckily, the pilot was able to land the plane safely on the Gimli runway, giving the plane the nickname "Gimli Glider".
In 1999, the Institute for Safe Medication Practices reported an instance where a patient had received 0.5 grams of Phenobarbital (a sedative) instead of 0.5 grains when the recommendation was misread. A grain is a unit of measure equal to about 0.065 grams… yikes. The Institute has since emphasized that only the metric system should be used for prescribing drugs.
other math issues:
In 1628, crowds in Sweden watched in horror as a new warship, Vasa, sank less than a mile into her maiden voyage, with the death of 30 people on board.
Armed with 64 bronze cannons, it was considered by some to be the most powerful warship in the world. Experts who have studied it since it was raised in 1961 say it is asymmetrical, being thicker on the port side than the starboard side. One reason for this could be that the workmen were using different systems of measurement. Archaeologists have found four rulers used by the workmen who built the ship. Two were calibrated in Swedish feet, which had 12 inches, while the other two measured Amsterdam feet, which had 11 inches.
Even Columbus had conversion problems. He miscalculated the circumference of the earth when he used Roman miles instead of nautical miles, which is part of the reason he unexpectedly ended up in the Bahamas on October 12, 1492, and assumed he had hit Asia.
The polar explorer Robert Falcon Scott made a fatal miscalculation about the amount of food his men would need on their 1910-1912 expedition to the South Pole.
They were given rations of 4,500 calories per day, which is now known to be insufficient when hauling sledges, and especially at higher altitudes. According to Dr Mike Stroud, a polar veteran and expert in nutrition, the explorers were getting some 3,000 calories per day less than their bodies needed, and would have lost about 25kg of body weight before they reached their destination and started the return journey. Scott and his companions on the trek to the pole are now assumed to have died of starvation.
Dimensions of the mirror assembly in the Hubble telescope were slightly off. Hubble was launched in 1990, but immediately there was a problem in its work: the telescope transmitted a blurred image. After checking, it turned out that edges of the telescope’s main mirror were too flat, making the telescope "myopic". NASA scientists have developed a program for image processing and, at first glance, the problem was solved. One theory is that a speck of paint on a device used to test the mirror resulted in distorted measurements. But few months later, other problems were discovered (gyro failures, problems with solar panels and computer malfunctions), and NASA organized three space expeditions to eliminate those defects. One of them brought "glasses" for the telescope — optical correction system COSTAR. Manufacturing and delivering of "glasses" have cost NASA 49.9 million dollars, while since the beginning of telescope’s construction there were spent 6 billion dollars.
The Spanish government almost built a submarine that couldn’t resurface The Spanish government put $2.2 billion into a new submarine called The Isaac Peral, in 2013. Before they finished building it, the engineers saw an issue with the design. It wasn’t even finished at this point, yet the submarine was already extremely heavy. With the vessel being this heavy, it ran the risk of not being able to reemerge after submerging itself underwater. The engineers were able to trace the issue back to an easy miscalculation when drafting the design. The issue was that someone put a decimal point in the wrong place. To offset the weight of the enormous submarine, engineers were forced to make it even longer. By adding about six meters of length to the sub’s hull, they were able to make it more buoyant. Unfortunately, the mistake still cost them $11.4 million. Luckily, the mistake was caught before the submarine was built.
A Japanese company lost $225 million due to a stockbroker’s typo A minor mistake cost Mizuho Securities Co., a Japanese company, a lot of money in December of 2005. A stockbroker mistyped the data. Originally, he meant to offer a single share in J-Com’s stock for 610,000 yen (about $5,000) on the New York Stock Exchange, but instead, he ended up offering 610,000 shares for 1 yen. Investors jumped on the opportunity, buying up a fantastic deal of the mispriced stock. The loss was somewhat mitigated by stock exchange rules, which only allowed the stocks to be sold for as low as 572,000 yen. Due to this mistake, the company lost around $225 million.
Louisiana waterfall caused by Lake Peigneur disaster An oil rig contracted by Texaco drilled a bit too deep below the lake and struck a salt mine, which created a giant hole that quickly swallowed the lake in 1980. A giant whirlpool ensued, which swept up trees, boats, and barges. The accident caused giant geysers as the displaced air and water filled the caverns of the mine. This situation was caused by a minor miscalculation, which resulted in the rig drilling in the wrong coordinates. The lake went from just 6-feet deep to a monstrous 200-feet. Fortunately, no one died as a result, but Texaco ended up needing to pay $44.8 million in out-of-state settlements (almost $149 million adjusted for inflation), and the ecosystem of the lake was irreparably changed.
$39 is an excellent price to fly from Los Angeles to San Diego, so travels were ecstatic to get tickets at that low of a price. This happened to chagrin of Alitalia, the airline company that offered this price to travelers by accident. This price was actually a typo — the tickets were supposed to cost $3,900. However, their website offered the tickets, by forgetting a few zeros. Two-thousand tickets sold before Alitalia could correct the price online. Instead of fighting customers on their mistake, they chose to honor the cheap tickets to the tune of $7 million.
The Laufenburg bridge fail The bridge between Germany and Switzerland that didn’t meet in the middle. What is sea level? It varies from one place to another, and different countries use different benchmarks. "For example, Britain has measured height in relation to mean sea levels in Cornwall, while France measures height in relation to sea levels in Marseille," says Dr Philip Woodworth, of the National Oceanography Centre Liverpool. Germany, for its part, measures height in relation to the North Sea, while Switzerland, like France, opts for the Mediterranean Sea. This caused a problem in Laufenburg, a town that straddles Germany and Switzerland. As two halves of a new bridge grew closer to one another in 2003, it became clear that, instead of being at the same height "above sea level", one side was 54cm higher than the other. Builders knew that there was a 27cm difference between the two versions of sea level - but somehow it was doubled, rather than cancelled out. The German side reportedly had to be lowered before the bridge could be completed.
In the US, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge designers hadn’t calculated the wind driven resonance properly The disaster, which many call “the most dramatic failure in bridge engineering,” prompted civil engineers to focus more on safeguarding suspension bridges against the aerodynamic effects of wind. It was rebuilt in 1950. Excessive side-to-side swaying and vertical flapping earned the Tacoma Bridge its nickname, Galloping Gertie. Unfortunately, all attempts to stabilize the bridge were made in vain, as on November 7, 1940, the Tacoma Bridge began to violently twist, shake, and undulate uncontrollably. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXTSnZgrfxM )
Note, THIS bridge misalignment pic is a fake.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/misaligned-bridge-photo/
other expensive issues:
A missing Oxford comma had cost Oakhurst Dairy $5 million The oxford comma separates the penultimate and final items in a list and is usually considered optional. It is quite a sore subject for the Oakhurst Dairy shipping department — an overtime dispute between the company and its drivers hinged on the lack of one. Lawyers representing the drivers fought that there was a sentence in a contract the employees all signed, needed the oxford comma to clarify that overtime pay was forfeited in a specific situation. By settling the lawsuit, the company paid the drivers $5 million.
Canadian phone company Bell Aliant managed to escape an $888,888 contract with Rogers Communications thanks to a comma error.
According to The New York Times, the contract said: “This agreement shall be effective from the date it is made and shall continue in force for a period of five (5) years from the date it is made, and thereafter for successive five (5) year terms, unless and until terminated by one year prior notice in writing by either party.” Courts ruled the second comma meant the automatic renewal was not, in fact, automatic.
The Big Ben bell at the Houses of Parliament in London cracked during testing in 1857 and was melted down to be recast.
But the new bell, winched into position over three days in 1859, also quickly cracked. Disputes raged over who was at fault - there was even a libel case. One theory is that the massive hammer, at 6.5 hundredweight, was too heavy - at least for the particular alloy the bell was made from (seven parts tin to 22 of copper). The foundries which cast the bells had always argued this material was too brittle. The second bell was not replaced (it is still cracked), just rotated by an eighth of a turn. The hammer, however, was replaced by a lighter one.
Two of the first passenger jet airliners broke apart mid-air in 1954 because of “metal fatigue” — cracks in the edges of square windows that caused the planes to explode. Aircrafts had to be redesigned with rounded windows.
The Y2K Bug cost $500 billion A software bug across several software programs stored the date using only the last two digits of the year. This was not a problem until the year 2000 when the 00 would have been read as 1900 by computers.
Ariane 5 Flight 501 Europe’s newest un-manned satellite-launching rocket reused working software from its predecessor, the Ariane 4. Unfortunately, the Ariane 5’s faster engines exploited a bug that was not found in previous models. Thirty-six seconds into its maiden launch the rocket’s engineers hit the self destruct button following multiple computer failures. In essence, the software had tried to cram a 64-bit number into a 16-bit space. The resulting overflow conditions crashed both the primary and backup computers (which were both running the exact same software). The Ariane 5 had cost nearly $8 billion to develop, and was carrying a $500 million satellite payload when it exploded.
Patriot Missile Software Error cost: 28 lives The software on this missile system converted clock time to more accurate floating-point figures for calculation. However, due to a problem in the way it was designed, the timing became more and more inaccurate the longer it ran. On 25th February 1991, after running for 100 hours, the system’s time was off by a third of a second. It failed to notice the incoming Scud missile targeting the American barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, until too late. 28 American soldiers died due to that glitch.
James Howell threw away 7,500 bitcoins in 2009 Very few saw the way cryptocurrency would take off in the coming years in 2009. James Howell was not one of the few blessed with the foresight. Not long after acquiring 7,500 bitcoins when they were worth very little, Howell spilled coffee on his computer. He was able to salvage it and he sold most of the parts, and got all the information he thought he needed off of the hard drive. The hard drive sat in his drawer for quite a while, before he threw it away during a move. When he discovered his mistake, (and after seeing the way bitcoin had taken off), he began searching for the lost hard drive in the city dump. To make things worse, the Newport City council barred him from continuing the search, due to concerns about the environmental impact of disturbing possible hazardous waste. In December 2017, Bitcoin skyrocketed when it hit $19,783. This meant that Howell basically threw away $148 million.
New Jersey lost $400 million due to not following the directions Due to not proofreading an application, New Jersey missed out on a huge federal grant to be put toward education reform. In a bid to the federal government for educational reform money, a huge error cost the Garden State $400 million. That’s what made “Race to the Top,” a $4.35 billion educational grant from the U.S. Department of Education so special. New Jersey was so close to getting that grant, until an application error led to them falling 3 points short of winning, according to NJ.com. Instead of comparing the state’s budget information between 2008 and 2009, the state provided information for 2010 and 2011 instead, costing them five points, placing NJ in 10th place, and losing $400 million. If one group came out ahead, it was educators in Ohio who edged out New Jersey for the final slot.
B-2 Bomber crashed from rain Despite its primary purpose of being stealth, the B-2 military jet is one of the most recognizable military vehicles. It’s also the most expensive, and in this case, the high price did not guarantee the quality of materials. The $1.4 billion military machinery stalled and crashed upon takeoff during a practice flight in Guam when faulty sensors caused altitude, airspeed, and trajectory errors in 2008. Luckily, both pilots ejected before the crash and survived the incident. It’s been said that the problem was more than likely caused by heavy rain, as moisture seeped in and damaged the sensors because a technique to deal with moisture in the engines hadn’t been properly communicated to the right personnel. Today, this is considered one of the most expensive crashes in history.
Mariner 1 is the first apparatus of the NASA’s Mariner project (automatic interplanetary probes designed to investigate Mars, Venus and Mercury), the launch of which was scheduled on July 22, 1962.
The apparatus was supposed to fly to Venus, however, after 293 seconds it deviated from the course, and was destroyed over the Atlantic ocean. According to the official version, the programmer made a mistake while translating the handwritten formula into a computer code: he mistook the index symbol for a regular dash. As a result, the on-Board computer software perceived normal speed jumps as critical, which led to a failure. The accident could not have happened, but the device’s antenna lost contact with the guidance system on the Ground, and the program automatically moved to plan. The engineering error cost $18.5 million, which the New York Times called "the most expensive dash in history".
The space shuttle Columbia crash of 2003 will sadly go down in history as another spacecraft accident that should never have happened. The shuttle was torn apart upon re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere because of a piece of foam that fell from the shuttle’s external tank, breaching its wing. All seven astronauts on board Columbia were killed. When Columbia took off 16 days prior, a similar issue with falling foam had taken place, but nothing was done to correct the problem. This tragic incident led to the whole NASA space shuttle fleet being retired in 2011, and NASA bore tremendous public scrutiny for not taking precautions to secure the foam on the shuttle’s tank.
In 1989, a drunk driver caused the worst oil spill the U.S. had ever seen. The Exxon Valdez oil spill occurred when Captain Joe Hazelwood crashed the oil tanker into the Prince William Sound. Hazelwood was later convicted of operating the tanker while under the influence and negligent discharge of oil. 11 million gallons of oil were spilled in the accident, affecting 1,300 miles of the Alaskan coast. Wildlife was threatened and industries like fishing were severely impacted. The costs of cleaning up the spill, paying fines, and dealing with legal action added up to $4.4 billion.
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is considered the worst oil spill in history. 210 million gallons of oil were spilled following an explosion on the drilling rig. Oil threatened marine and wildlife habitats from Louisiana to Florida, and the spill continued for months as workers attempted time and again to stop the flow of oil. Ultimately, an investigation revealed that BP, the British company responsible for the Deepwater Horizon rigger, had cut corners on safety with disastrous effects. Cutting corners turned out to be very costly for BP. Cleaning up after the disaster and paying associated fines and legal fees has stuck the company with a $61 billion bill.
Soviet Gas Pipeline Explosion The Soviet pipeline had a level of complexity that would require advanced automated control software. The CIA was tipped off to the Soviet intentions to steal the control system’s plans. Working with the Canadian firm that designed the pipeline control software, the CIA had the designers deliberately create flaws in the programming so that the Soviets would receive a compromised program. It is claimed that in June 1982, flaws in the stolen software led to a massive explosion along part of the pipeline, causing the largest non-nuclear explosion in the planet’s history.
Fukushima Daiichi was a nuclear power plant on the coast of Japan that unfortunately gained worldwide notoriety in March of 2011. An earthquake caused the reactors at the plant to shut down, but it also caused a tsunami. The tsunami shut down the plant’s backup generator, preventing the necessary cooling process from taking place. Following this unfortunate chain of events, three nuclear reactors melted down and hydrogen explosions released dangerous radiation into the air. A 2012 investigation found that all of these events were totally preventable. Unfortunately, guidelines for the plant’s necessary maintenance had been ignored and disaster struck at Fukushima.
The Chernobyl disaster is the worst, most deadly nuclear accident of all time. The worst part is, it occurred due to some totally preventable mistakes. On April 25, 1986, a drill simulating a power outage at Chernobyl led to uncontrolled reactions and a steam fire that burned for nine days. 134 workers were hospitalized due to radiation exposure, and 31 of them died in the following few weeks. 14 of them would later die from cancer, possibly caused by the radiation. The Chernobyl power plant ran on a Soviet-designed reactor that wasn’t up to code for usage anywhere else in the world. Design flaws in that reactor caused the terrible incident, and irreparable damage occurred.
In 1979, disaster struck at a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. A pressure valve in the reactor at Three Mile Island malfunctioned, causing water contaminated with radiation to flood the buildings. Meanwhile, the nuclear core got dangerously close to melting down. In the event of a nuclear meltdown, radiation would have leaked into the earth exposing thousands of people to dangerous levels of contaminants. At one point, a large hydrogen bubble had formed in the plant, which many feared would lead to a total meltdown. Luckily, engineers were able to shut down the reactor and crisis was averted. Containing the radiation and stopping the meltdown wasn’t cheap. The Three Mile Island incident cost $839.6 million to fix.
==== sourced from ====
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/25845/quick-6-six-unit-conversion-disasters
https://www.rd.com/list/most-expensive-mistakes-ever-made/
https://www.finance101.com/expensive-mistakes/
https://time.com/107403/from-fat-trains-to-collapsing-bridges-8-famous-engineering-mistakes/
https://www.history101.com/30-of-the-most-expensive-mistakes-in-history/
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/news/16-of-the-most-expensive-mistakes-in-history/ss-BBjZkVx#image=5
https://www.quora.com/What-was-the-most-expensive-math-error-ever
https://hit.media/en/2019/04/19/samye-dorogie-oshibki-kosmicheskih-inzhenerov/
https://raygun.com/blog/costly-software-errors-history/
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27509559
https://www.dcslsoftware.com/most-expensive-software-mistakes/
===== for further research =====
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