About seven hours into the flight of Artemis II, Commander Reid Wiseman experienced something many earthbound Microsoft users know all too well: his Outlook email stopped working.
Speaking with mission control in Houston, Commander Wiseman can be heard saying that he had “two Microsoft Outlooks [on his PCD], and neither one of those are working.” PCD stands for “Personal Computing Device”, which are specialized laptops or tablets, used by the Artemis astronauts to manage certain tasks, including accessing email clients, during the 10-day mission to the moon. PCDs are crucial 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 humans have gone before.
Wiseman then asks Houston, “If you want to remote in and check … those two Outlooks that would be awesome.” Houston then confirms they are going to log into his PCD and let the commander “know when we are done.” The audio clip stops there, sadly, so we have no way of knowing if Wiseman was asked the immortal query of if he’d tried turning his PCD off and on again before contacting extraterrestrial IT support.
WIRED has contacted both NASA and Microsoft for a more detailed explanation on the email outage. Could Wiseman have installed third-party add-ins that so often conflict with Outlook, causing it to freeze or fail? Trello would be useful, obviously, and Zoom seems appropriate for a vessel traveling 17,500 mph, or 4.9 miles per second.
Has someone sent Wiseman a particularly high-resolution video file of NASA’s coverage of the launch, all 6 hours and 22 minutes of it, thereby exceeding his OneDrive limit? Would Gmail have been better (especially now you can change your name)? How will he receive one of WIRED’s out-of-this-world newsletters if this sticky situation continues? Vital questions, all of them.
Microsoft’s Outlook press representative said they may have some information from the company for us later today, and we’ll update this piece if we get that. NASA so far has yet to respond, but the agency is understandably a little busy at the moment.
Of course, as IT issues go, while not being able to get into your email as you drift between 6,000 and 9,000 kilometers above the surface of the far side of the moon is no doubt frustrating, it’s undoubtedly on the smaller end of the scale of space-related software snafus.
In 1962, the NASA Mariner 1 spacecraft was intentionally destroyed after launch due to a guidance system failure traced to a single missing character in handwritten code, a hyphen, which caused the Atlas Agena rocket to veer off course and be given the destruct command after just 293 seconds of flight time. The mission failure supposedly cost $18.5 million at the time, which would be more than $200 million today. The incident, famous in engineering circles, is often referred to as “the most expensive hyphen in history.”