11 small typos that caused big disasters

• Typos happen. Usually they don't cause much trouble.
• But for stock brokers, politicians, and coders, "fat finger" errors can have massive consequences.
• Here's a list of some of the costliest typos ever, from exploded rockets to stock brokers serving jail time.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

We've probably all made typos, but rarely have our small mistakes amounted to colossal disasters that would ruin our lives and be remembered for decades.

That's what happened to some people who didn't double-check (or triple-check) their work. When designing rockets for NASA, it's important to be precise. The same goes for stock trading.

These are the typos that have toppled businesses, blown up rockets, and lost companies billions of dollars.

A NASA rocket exploded in 1962 because of a misplaced hyphen.

Mariner 1 launched on Juy 22, 1962. It was intended to do an unmanned fly-by of Venus to collect scientific data, but an error in the computer codes caused it to veer off course. This was NASA's first planetary mission, and it was losing to Russia in the already contentious space race.

As it turns out, a misplaced hyphen seems to have caused the rocket's trajectory to be off. A NASA range-safety officer wanted to avoid any possible crashes back down to Earth, so 293 seconds into the launch, he blew it up. The coding blunder cost NASA $80 million (in today's money, that's over $673 million). There were conflicting reports, some of which blamed a misplaced decimal and others saying a hyphen caused the error in trajectory.

Luckily, Mariner 2, a backup rocket, was already built and waiting just in case disaster struck. That one completed the mission successfully, but Mariner 1 would always be remembered for its critical error. Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke called it "the most expensive hyphen in history."

A tax-code typo is keeping restaurants from remodeling.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 was supposed to give tax breaks to mom-and-pop restaurants and shops that wanted to remodel their stores. Instead, an immediate tax break became one that wouldn't kick in for 39 years, all because of a typo.

The mistake reportedly happened because lawmakers were in a rush to get the act passed, so restaurants and shops were excluded from the tax write-off list.

Japanese securities once sold for pennies by mistake, costing a brokerage firm $225 million.

In 2005, a Japanese company called Mizuho Securities Co. lost at least $225 million on a stock trade thanks to a "fat finger" error.

The typo accidentally listed 610,000 shares of their company at 1 yen apiece, instead of what they intended: one share for 610,000 yen ($5,041).

Mizuho tried to cancel its mistake three times, but the Tokyo Stock Exchange doesn't cancel orders, mistake or no mistake. So Mizuho lost $225 million, which set off the Nikkei 225 index to go down by nearly 2%.