By the time you read this, I am somewhere in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile.
At 2,400 metres above sea level. No humidity. No light pollution. Just the clearest night sky on the planet — and more telescopes per square kilometre than anywhere else on Earth.
The reason the world’s best observatories are here is the same reason I think about precision every day:
The conditions have to be exactly right. Almost right isn’t good enough.
The $327 Million Mistake
On 23 September 1999, NASA lost the Mars Climate Orbiter.
Not to a technical failure. Not to a design flaw. Not to bad luck.
To a unit conversion error.
Lockheed Martin’s navigation software was sending thruster data in imperial units — pound-force seconds. NASA’s navigation team was reading it in metric — newton-seconds. The conversion factor between them is 4.45 to 1.
Nobody caught it. The Orbiter entered the Martian atmosphere at the wrong angle and was destroyed.
Cost: $327.6 million USD.
Cause: a number that was almost right.
The distance from Earth to Mars averages 12.5 light-minutes — roughly 225 million kilometres.
At that scale, being slightly off doesn’t mean a small error. It means losing the spacecraft entirely.
When your Excel calculation is off by 1cent, you won’t lose a spacecraft.
You’ll just lose the margin. Or the client.
Or the trust of the person reading the report.
The scale is different. The principle is identical.
What I’ve seen in over 40 years of consulting:
The most dangerous number in any business isn’t the wrong one. It’s the one that’s almost right — because almost right gets through every check, every review, every sign-off.
Until it doesn’t.
P.S. The Atacama is also where astronomers first measured the universe’s expansion rate. Precision, it turns out, changes everything — whether you’re looking at galaxies or spreadsheets.