The Mars Climate Orbiter crashed over this very confusion, instead of going into orbit as planned.
NASA, which has done everything in metric for quite some while now, had programmed the space craft to operate in metric units. Somehow, the bonehead engineers did their math in english.
The result was $125 million down the drain.
Btw, this wasn't the first time something like this happened.
Missing punctuation (period instead of a comma) in Fortran code caused on spacecraft to get lost.
The following forum at
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks details lots of cases like this. Good reading.
Not that a FIRST bot would get lost in space, but it might crash and burn. Anybody got good stories where programming errors did really strange things to your bots?