Comment by schiffern
13 days ago
In the official BIPM brochure, hours are technically classified as "Non-SI units accepted for use with SI." This puts them in the same category as liters, hectares, tonnes, decibels, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-SI_units_mentioned_in_the_...
I can read Wikipedia too. All the calculations are done in m, s, g, etc. if you want to dumb it down to the public you might as well go in miles per hour, leagues per day, etc., spaceflight is not the place where it is appropriate.
I'm proud of you?
Presumably you can also read the official BIPM SI Brochure. As mentioned, it will tell you the same thing:
https://www.bipm.org/documents/20126/41483022/SI-Brochure-9-...
1. Quick, call the spaceflight units police.
2. When you ask the regular units police (BIPM), their official decision is that hours are "accepted."
I trust you can read the dictionary definition of "accepted" all on your own.
> spaceflight is not the place where it is appropriate.
But, a video stream meant for the public consumption is. SI are standardized for the context of calculations, not necessarily for human consumption, which happens to be why nobody gives the weather in degrees kelvin.
Their main target audience is still space geeks. Parts of broadcast will be shown in daily news bits on cnn and reuters, who will still translate the height to football fields, velocity to car speed, etc. Geeks will watch and re-watch it multiple times and fight over crazy theories online and it really helps if you can use normal units of measure.
Btw the rest of the world measure temperature in Celsius which is derived from Kelvin (by adding or subtracting the value of absolute zero in Celsius).
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> if you want to dumb it down to the public you might as well go in miles per hour,
The blue origin launch this week used mph and feet of elevation, and I can definitively say that using modified SI is way way better than US customary
Well, at least they didn't do knots, that's progress I guess :)