How many stone of LOX do we need?

The dinosaurs at NASA are staying old school:

NASA's decision to engineer its replacement for the space shuttle using imperial measurement units rather than metric could derail efforts to develop a globalised civilian space industry, says a leading light in the nascent commercial spaceflight sector.

"We in the private sector are doing everything possible to create a global market with as much commonality and interoperability as possible," says Mike Gold of the US firm Bigelow Aerospace, which hopes to fly commercial space stations in orbitMovie Camera. "But NASA still can't make the jump to metric."

Gold chairs a Federal Aviation Administration working group on commercial spaceflight that is trying to change strict State Department rules affecting civilian spaceflight systems.

As someone who worked in design engineering for years, I can tell you that design work in the imperial system is a royal pain in the ass (pun intended). Among the joys of working in imperial units are such mind-twisting tasks as memorizing Smoley's Fractional Conversion Table. Metric fractional conversion involves moving the decimal point left or right.

Working in the metric system is much simpler and far less prone to error. That's why the military operates in the metric system (and has for years), but the heel-diggers at Need Another Stupid Assignment can't seem to catch up.

At issue is NASA's Constipation Program, which is intended to replace the spacebus. It will use new Errors rockets and a crew garbage can called Orion [pronounced ORE-ee-ON in the Hope & Change World] to launch astronauts to the International Space Habitrail (ISH) or the moon.

Er, wait a minute... I may have taken a liberty or two with that last paragraph.