I'm Gretchen Rubin and this is a little happier.

And if you're anything like me and I think you probably are, sometimes you feel terrible

because you made a silly, obvious dumb mistake.

And you think, yeah, it could happen to anyone.

Yes, nobody's perfect.

But still, I often find it hard to let something like that go when I make just a dumb mistake.

And I happen to be slightly obsessing about a dumb mistake that I had made with my calendar.

And I came upon a reference to a mistake that NASA made.

And it made me feel much better about my mistake.

And perhaps this story will also allow you to feel better about a mistake you've made.

So in 1999, NASA lost its unmanned $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter, which was sent into

space to study the weather on Mars.

And it was lost.

It was destroyed.

Why?

Because spacecraft engineers forgot to convert from feet into meters when exchanging vital

data before the launch.

Yes, the team that designed and built the spacecraft used inches, feet, and pounds, and

the navigation team used the metric system.

This resulted in a simple math error that caused the craft to burn up in Mars' atmosphere.

You know, mistakes happen.

And rocket scientists can make a simple math mistake.

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