Being responsible for overseeing the successful completion of a costly project can at times prove frustrating, particularly when having to endure unnecessary setbacks due to human error. These scenarios generally occur as a result of lack of communication, lack of required skills, the absence of management controls, checks and balances or miscalculations. 

This type of circumstance is in most cases completely and utterly avoidable and over a period of time, organisations and businesses generally learn these lessons. 
Albeit that construction by its very nature is a costly endeavour and errors resulting from miscalculations or miscommunication can come at great expense, this is also a lesson that NASA learnt the hard way, when in 1999 they lost a piece of equipment worth $125 million.

In 1999 the Mars Orbiter was lost because a Lockheed Martin engineering team (Lockheed Martin helped build, develop and operate the spacecraft) used English units of measurement, while the team from NASA used the metric system for a key spacecraft operation.

NASA has been using the metric system predominantly since at least 1990.

The units mismatch prevented navigation information from transferring between the Mars Climate Orbiter spacecraft team at Lockheed Martin in Denver and the flight team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, destroying the mission on what was supposed to be a day of celebration, the day the craft was scheduled to enter into Mars' orbit. It is likely that it ploughed through the atmosphere and continued out beyond Mars. 

At the time Tom Gavin, then JPL administrator, to whom all project managers reported, made it clear that no one was pointing fingers at Lockheed Martin. 

"This is an end-to-end process problem," he said. "A single error like this should not have caused the loss of Climate Orbiter. Something went wrong in our system processes in checks and balances that we have that should have caught this and fixed it."

There is no doubt an important lesson to be learnt from this.

Reference: Article by By Robin Lloyd (Metric mishap caused loss of NASA orbiter) for CNN.com

Ernest Roper | Membership Services Manager