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Welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service,

where you'll weekly guide to the numbers all around us and I'm Tim Halford.

These love, reap, set, cease, sign, got, got, do, you need day, food.

I'll imagine.

In June 1996, the first Arianne 5 rocket took off from the European Space Agency's launch site in French Guyana.

The launch marked almost a decade of hard work and billions of dollars of investment.

The scientists involved were working on a mission to study how the solar wind affects the Earth's magnetic field.

It was called the cluster project.

I'm sure there's a joke in there somewhere because the rocket veered off course and only 37 seconds into its flight exploded.

The failure wasn't caused by human error or a mechanical problem, but simply because the rocket's onboard computer got it's math wrong.

It's an example of what's called integer overflow when a number's too big for a computer to handle.

And it affects all sorts of things from planes to pop music.

As the freelance science and technology journalist, Chris Baraniuk has been telling me.

So Chris, what went wrong with Arianne 5's computers?

Arianne 5 was a very advanced spaceship that's still actually used today as a rocket.

In 1996, it was its first flight.

There was a number in the software that was trying to be converted from a large space in the computer's memory into a much smaller one.

And consequently, that number didn't fit. So it switched into this shut-down mode and self-destruct sequence was initiated.

So it blew itself up like in the Bond movies.

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