sometimes i go on wikipedia deep dives about historically dumb US political events because they never actually talked about any of the incredibly goofy shit this country did when i took history courses in school.
today i found out reagan is the reason why we’re living in the 1800s using the imperial system while the rest of the world is sensibly using metric. the previous administration had passed a metrification act in the late 70s that was planning to move everything over which was overturned when he came into office because eww icky french??? commies???? they basically said yeah metric is fine but there’s zero mandate on what units are required to be used.
now this lead to me remembering the mars climate orbiter which was a satellite launched in ‘98 to do, you’re not gonna believe this, climate research in the orbit of mars. upon arrival to the martian sphere of influence the capture burn killed too much orbital velocity putting it into an elliptical orbit with the periapsis (lowest point of the orbit) being well within the martian atmosphere where it eventually burned up.
this happened because when nasa had done all it’s contracting for the project they’d specified metric units for everything and one certain contractor had submitted software logging the engine thrust in pounds per second instead of newton meters per second causing a huge discrepancy in the actual engine output as opposed to what was calculated. so to some degree reagan was indirectly responsible for crashing a $300mil (as of ‘99 money) research satellite 10 years after he was out of office.
but more importantly something i dug further and just learned today, this certain unnamed contractor was FUCKING LOCKHEED MARTIN. WE DECIDED THAT THE COMPANY THAT FUCKED UP A MASSIVE COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH PROJECT BECAUSE THEY DIDN’T PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT WAS EXPECTED OF THEM WERE JUST THE PEOPLE WE NEEDED TO SPEND AN EXPECTED TRILLION DOLLARS ON MAKING FIGHTER JETS.
like i get that the jsf program started before the satellite incident happened, but if it were a sane country maybe we could have reevaluated and gone “hey these guys are fucking idiots let’s use this money for public services” instead of “yeah let’s double down even though the project is getting exponentially more costly and the company is proving to be a failure where it really matters but all my buddies are on their payroll and they’ll give us free shit if we keep funding them”
