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Mars Climate Orbiter, 1999
A weighty problem in space.
Programmers work in teams to build software for a space mission. Unfortunately for NASA's $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter, two teams didn't know what the other was up to. One team was using Imperial weight measures (pounds). The other was using metric (kilograms). The mistake wasn't found until, when finally in space, the two programs spoke to each other, got very confused and caused the spacecraft to become lost in space.
