Nautical mile

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A nautical mile is a unit of length with a very long and rich historical background within NASA's multi-decade-long space-faring tradition.

1 Scientific definition
2 Non-NASA usage
3 The wisdom of NASA officials
4 Mars Climate Orbiter
5 See also

[edit] Scientific definition

The nautical mile is scientifically defined as exactly 110-score nautical fathoms, where each nautical fathom contains 3 and 5/17 nautical feet which in turn are composed of 12 nautical toes and an ell. Of course, this highly intuitive definition applied only to the medieval Swiss Navy nautical mile, which was never in common usage by any sea-faring nation (including the Swiss).

The British nautical mile, in comparison, was defined as the maximum distance from land a ship could sail before King George III would get seasick and barf (whether he was actually onboard the ship or not). Colonial Americans would not stand for this nonsense, so they revolted already and commissioned Benjamin Franklin to construct a prototype platinum-iridium bar exactly one (1.00) American nautical mile tall, which dominates the Philadelphian skyline to this day.

[edit] Non-NASA usage

Despite the ribald and saucy naval-flavored name, the nautical mile is simply not used for anything nautical these days. Ancient maritime legend has it that the unit was abandoned long long ago by all the competent navies of the world when they suddenly realized that length measured at sea differed in no measurably physical way from length measured on land; and therefore everybody could safely substitute kilometers, making their lives that much easier and more productive. (Of course, this was all before Albert Einstein and his bizarre theories, but we are not interested in any of that.)

[edit] The wisdom of NASA officials

When NASA was founded in 1959 on the lofty principles of scientific discovery and scientific reason and advanced space-age technologies and those nifty slide rules, they also realized the overriding importance of beating the commie bastards with good old fashioned American bureaucracy. Therefore, all NASA inductees were (and still are) strongly discouraged from measuring anything in godless foreign units. Where-ever they go these days, NASA continues to measure all lengths, distances, and other physical quantities entirely in nautical miles, from the dizzying heights of low earth orbit to the sizes and weights of those tiny multi-million dollar government-issue wing nuts which regularly escape overboard from the windows of the Space Shuttle in alarming numbers.

[edit] Mars Climate Orbiter

In spite of the continuing wisdom of NASA officials by way of its continual usage of nautical miles, there are still occasional minor snags, such as that one time way back in 1999 when the Mars Climate Orbiter was lost with all hands only some 1,337 nautical miles above the red planet's surface. According to unconfirmed government reports, the captain of the doomed spacecraft panicked at the last second when he found out that his multi-million dollar government-issue slide rule had been tampered with by Dr Smith (who, for unknown nefarious purposes, had surreptitiously reprogrammed the device to convert all scientific readouts to useless metric miles).