Even Artemis II Astronauts Have Microsoft Outlook Problems
About seven hours During the flight of Artemis II, Commander Reid Wiseman had an experience that many land-based Microsoft users are all too familiar with: his Outlook email stopped working.
Speaking to Mission Control in Houston, Commander Wiseman can be heard saying that he had “two Microsoft Outlook [on his PCD]and none of them work. PCD stands for Personal Computing Device, which are specialized laptops or tablets used by Artemis astronauts to manage certain tasks, including accessing email clients, during the 10-day mission to the Moon. The PCDs are essential for the four-person crew to interact with mission data and communicate during the historic lunar flyby, which will also take them further into space than any human has before.
Wiseman then asks Houston, “If you want to log in remotely and check…these two Outlooks, that would be great.” » Houston then confirms that they will log into his PCD and let the commander know “when we are finished”. The audio clip ends there, unfortunately, so we have no way of knowing if Wiseman was asked the immortal question of whether he tried turning his PCD off and on again before contacting alien IT support.
WIRED has reached out to NASA and Microsoft for a more detailed explanation on the messaging outage. Could Wiseman have installed third-party add-ins that so often conflict with Outlook, causing it to crash or fail? Trello would obviously be useful, and Zoom seems appropriate for a ship traveling at 17,500 mph, or 4.9 miles per second.
Did someone send Wiseman a particularly high-resolution video file of NASA’s launch coverage, all 6 hours and 22 minutes of it, exceeding his OneDrive limit? Would Gmail have been better (especially now you can change your name)? How will he receive one of WIRED’s unusual newsletters if this delicate situation persists? Vital questions, all of them.
Microsoft’s Outlook press representative said he might have information from the company to share with us later today, and we’ll update this article if we get it. NASA hasn’t responded yet, but the agency is understandably a little busy at the moment.
Of course, when it comes to computer issues, while it’s undoubtedly frustrating to not be able to access your emails when you’re drifting 6,000 to 9,000 kilometers above the surface of the far side of the Moon, this is undoubtedly on the lower end of the scale of space-related software issues.
In 1962, NASA’s Mariner 1 spacecraft was intentionally destroyed after launch due to a guidance system failure attributable to a single missing character in the handwritten code, a hyphen, which caused the Atlas Agena rocket to veer off course and be ordered destroyed after only 293 seconds of flight. The mission failure reportedly cost $18.5 million at the time, which would be more than $200 million today. This incident, famous in engineering circles, is often referred to as “the most expensive hyphen in history.”
