NASA has finally agreed to fly to the moon in metric - a move its scientists have wanted ever since they mixed up kilometres with miles and crashed an expensive spacecraft near Mars.
The actual mixup was pounds (of force) and Newtons, and the JPL trajectory analysts knew that the spacecraft was off course but their managers would not listen to them when they said that a course correction was needed. That was real cause of the accident. Moral of the story: when your highly educated expert employee tells you that he doesn't understand what is going on, you better drop everything and get to the bottom of the mystery before disaster happens.
On the other hand many caculations are simplified with metrics, wavelength for example. Amps, Volts, Farads, Henrys, Ohms, Frequency, and Watts are same in metric and need no conversion.
The electrical units are NOT "the same in metric", they ARE metric!!!
My pet metric peeves:
Newspaper and magazine editors (probably English majors) who quote excessive precision when converting from metric to US units, as in "the asteroid is estimated to have a diameter of 1000 kilometers (620 miles)". The scientist they interviewed does not know the diameter to more than one significant figure, so quoting 620 miles is absurd.
The same editors also convert rocket thrust from pounds (of force) into kilograms, because they don't know that pounds can measure mass or force and these ARE NOT THE SAME THING! In respected scientific publications I see statements such as "the 100 pound (45.3 kilogram) rocket thrusters..." when they SHOULD have written "the 100 pound (400 Newton) rocket thrusters....".
As a teaching assistant in the freshman "physics for pharmacists" class I was required to teach the international students about feet, inches, pounds and miles when I should have been teaching the US students how to do physics in metric units.
It is however a fact of life that both systems of units will be around for quite some time, and engineers in the United States need to be fully conversant in both systems of measurements. And if I find a nice South Bend lathe on E-bay I'm not going to pass it up just because it wasn't made for metric machining.
Dan Schultz N8FGV