Metric police strike VOA space history story

Voice of America radio program... August 8, 2006

http://www.voanews.com/specialenglis...08-08-voa1.cfm

"Today, Shirley Griffith and Tony Riggs complete a report
about America's second manned space program, Gemini."

Story about Gemini-7/6 rendezvous, and how it ended
with: "Finally, the voice of Thomas Stafford came through
the silence of space. "We are thirty-six meters apart and sitting.""

Now, I'm a big fan of the metric system, and use it whenever I can,
but as a historian, I darned sure don't remember Tom Stafford
giving the range to Gemini-7 in meters.

No doubt he made his comment at a range of about 36 meters,
but putting those words inside quotation marks is a little revisionist --
sort of like the NASA History poster in the mid-1990's that described
how in 1961 JFK had vowed "to put a person on the Moon and bring
them safely back to Earth...", in quotes.

Stafford really said he was at "one hundred and twenty feet", by the way.