This list has showcased just how important punctuation is, especially in regards to the placement and usage of the comma, but in this entry, you will see that a hyphen can also lead to the loss of millions of dollars. In 1962, NASA launched the Mariner 1 spacecraft which was supposed to be America’s first interplanetary probe, and its mission was to visit the planet Venus, Probes like this require very specific coding in order function properly, and unfortunately for NASA, someone forgot to place a hyphen somewhere in the probe’s coding for trajectory and speed, which caused the probe to explode only a few minutes after it launched. A few weeks later, NASA sent a different probe to Venus, but the fact that Mariner 1 exploded, effectively meant that 18.5 million dollars (almost 150 million in today’s money) literally went up in flames.