NASA's $125 million mistake

Think communication at your company is bad?

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Well, once, a simple miscommunication turned into a $125 million disaster for NASA.

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To set the scene, we’re going to take you back to 1999, a time when you could download your favorite music from a service called Napster, Smash Mouth released a catchy song, and everyone was worried that all the computers in the world would stop working because of a computer bug.

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It was also the year NASA launched its Mars Climate Orbiter, which was intended to be the first weather observer on another planet.

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But as the $125 million orbiter approached Mars, it disappeared, and scientists soon realized that it had burned up in the red planet’s atmosphere.

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So what happened? Well, the error was in the software controlling the orbiter’s thrusters. And it was a ridiculously simple mistake: two teams were using different units of measurement.

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You see, Lockheed Martin, the company that built the spacecraft, expressed force in pounds. But for space missions, it’s common to convert that to newtons. So the NASA- team s assumed the conversion had been made and didn’t check.

Yep. $125 million gone in an instant because one team was using Imperial units, and one team was using metric units, and no one thought to talk to the other team.

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Ouch.

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But this isn’t a mistake that only happens at NASA. How many times can you think of when something has gone wrong at the company you work for because of silos and miscommunication? How many times have things gone awry because someone made an assumption?

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Generally speaking, it’s better to communicate more than necessary than to just keep your head down and assume that everyone else knows what to do.

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So let’s all avoid those $125 million mistakes and take the initiative to communicate better and more often.