The de facto units in aerospace is usually thousands of feet for altitude and nautical miles for distance, knots (nm per hour) for speed and pounds for thrust.

The de facto units in aerospace is usually thousands of feet for altitude and nautical miles for distance, knots (nm per hour) for speed and pounds for thrust. Some older aerospace literature I have even uses nautical miles for orbital altitude. I'm fine with this, but I'm not fine with mixing imperial and metric units. The worst was NASA Space Shuttle launches where they used statute miles for downrange distance with some nautical miles here and there for good measure. I'm guessing they use SI units internally for engineering.