Actually, if I recall the situation, it was actually a piece of software from a contractor that was using the imperial measurements. When the NASA engineers input the metric telemetry values, that's when things went belly-up. I fully agree with that point, though; I don't see what imperial measurements were doing anywhere near a science-related field. It made me chuckle this semester when the general chemistry class I'm taking as a side requirement for my physics major started off with a bunch of unit conversion problems, most of which involving imperial to SI somewhere along the line; as much as I say I enjoy working with the damn things, I was still wondering, "Wait...won't all these newbie chem majors compleely ignore the existence of the imperial system within a week or two?"
Edit: Actually, Flipside, one mole of Carbon-12 is exactly 12 grams; it's the standard for the periodic table. The official SI standard for the kilogram is, believe it or not, a precise platinum-iridium alloy somewhere in France. From what I remember, the meter is defined by the wavelength of a specific frequency of light, and the second by the distance light travels in 1/c seconds, so they're both intrinsically tied to the speed of light. Then you have non-SI but still metric units, like the calorie, which is defined as the amount of heat necessary to raise the temperature of a gram of water by 1 degree Celsius (about 4.184 Joules, if I remember correctly). And don't get me started on how many hogsheads equal a barrel; at least the only place you see those sorts of things are in those useless tables at the front of composition notebooks.
