Chad Frey

Over twenty-five years ago, our failure to adopt the metric system resulted in the loss of our Mars Climate Orbiter probe launched at Cape Canaveral on December 11, 1998. On September 23, 1999, communication with the orbiter was lost as it came too close to the surface of Mars. An investigation discovered the failure to be caused by a mismatch between the metric units used by NASA and the spacecraft’s builder Lockheed Martin that used the non-metric system.

Kansas cities, like all American cities—including all the blue ones that our new president regularly attacks—are not radical places. They may have more Democratic voters than the state’s rural counties, and those voters may prefer more egalitarian policies than will ever pass in Topeka, but their economies are just as dependent upon capitalism as the state and country as a whole.