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The Planetary Society Blog

By Emily Lakdawalla

News from NASA: Going metric on the Moon

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Yesterday's Science@NASA news item was the astounding announcement that "NASA has decided to use metric units for all operations on the lunar surface when it returns to the Moon." I'm so accustomed to using metric units whenever I talk about science that I forget that most NASA spacecraft are built by American contractors that still work with nuts and bolts measured in inches and pounds rather than millimeters and kilograms. Space scientists have been using metric units for a long, long time, but there's a lot of inertia among contractors in workshops tooled to Imperial units rather than metric. (Never mind the inertia of the American public, which doesn't have anything to do with this announcement.)

This story made me roll my eyes at first ("whoop-te-doo, NASA's finally entering the twentieth nineteenth eighteenth century"). But then it made me ask, why now? And the answer is a pleasant one: because NASA is recognizing the importance of international cooperation in the upcoming decades of lunar exploration. The announcement said:

The decision is a victory not only for the metric system itself, which by this decision increases its land area in the solar system by 27%, but also for the spirit of international cooperation in exploring the Moon. The decision arose from a series of meetings that brought together representatives from NASA and 13 other space agencies to discuss ways to cooperate and coordinate their lunar exploration programs. Standardizing on the metric system was an obvious step in the right direction.

"When we made the announcement at the meeting, the reps for the other space agencies all gave a little cheer," says Jeff Volosin, strategy development lead for NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate. "I think NASA has been seen as maybe a bit stubborn by other space agencies in the past, so this was important as a gesture of our willingness to be cooperative when it comes to the Moon."

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