You were at JPL with us? I wonder if we met.
The end result of the mars missions were to put a toy car on the surface of Mars, because we haven't made the technological leap to get men there, nor can we afford to make it, because we are wasting our resources.
Actually, that was a pretty impressive feat. Manned mission to Mars are still a long ways off. I just want to see us back on the Moon (to stay). We are along way from solving many of the technical manned Mars problems, including funding.
One of the things necessary to get there successfully, is to learn how to convert metric to standard numbers.
I knew people who were on that program. :-( I have been on my share of launch/mission failures. Not exactly a good time had by all.
Do you know that it takes an average of 1.2 million signatures to get one shuttle off the ground?
Since I am not in the "loop" for shuttle launches, I was not aware of this number. However, I did have to deal with the Shuttle ICD 2-19001 series often.