The decision of NASA to use the system called “imperial” (U.S.) instead of the metric system for the Constellation project could hurt efforts to develop a civil global space industry.

The space industry is trying yet to standardize and improve communication between various international actors.

The future program will use new Constellation rocket named Ares and a capsule called Orion to go to the International Space Station (ISS) or the Moon. However, the Ares rocket is derived directly from the shuttle currently used, which are now 30 years old. The measures used in design were American, not international. NASA has therefore calculated the costs of a possible conversion to SI units (International System), obtaining a result of … $ 370 million, or half the cost of a launch.

This budget problem has therefore forced NASA to keep the project on obsolete measuring units. This has worried the civil operators who wanted to match their technologies to the specifications of the new spacecraft for NASA.

In the past, these preoccupations with a correspondence of standards had several serious consequences, the most famous is perhaps the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999, valued at $ 125 million. It was a difference in the system of measuring units used by the various departments which had caused the incident.