In 1999, NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter disintegrated in space.
It didn’t blow up. It wasn’t hacked. It didn’t drift off course.
It was perfectly on track—until it wasn’t.
The cause?
A simple miscommunication between two teams.
One used metric units. The other used imperial.
They were measuring thrust in different ways and never reconciled it.
The result: the orbiter went too low into the Martian atmosphere and was lost forever.
$125 million, gone.
Because someone assumed the data was right.
Let that sink in.
This wasn’t a space problem
It was a data problem—the same kind that plagues businesses every day.
You’re probably not working on space missions. But the risk is just as real.
Companies make decisions based on inconsistent, unverified, and often misunderstood data:
- Sales and marketing don’t define “qualified leads” the same way
- Finance and ops don’t agree on how revenue is booked
- Dashboards show clean visuals built on broken foundations
And no one’s checking the math.
Here’s how to stop data from crashing your next mission:
- Standardize your formats. If your teams define key metrics differently, you’re flying blind.
- Establish real governance. Data needs an owner, not just a pipeline.
Audit your assumptions. Clean dashboards don’t mean clean data. Build checks, run
Good data doesn’t happen by default. It’s designed, managed, and maintained.
It’s easy to laugh at a $125M math error—until it’s your product launch, your customer churn, your blown forecast.
Want better decisions?
Start with better data.
Want help making your team’s data decision-ready?
This is exactly where Blue Nubia step in.
