Even the Artemis II astronauts had problems with Microsoft Outlook

About seven hours On Artemis II’s journey, Commander Reed Wiseman encountered something that many Microsoft users on Earth know all too well: his Outlook email stopped working.

Speaking to Mission Control in Houston, Commander Weissman can be heard saying he has “a couple of Microsoft Outlooks [on his PCD]And neither is working.” PCD stands for “Personal Computing Device,” which are specialized laptops or tablets that Artemis astronauts use to manage certain tasks, including accessing email clients, during the 10-day Moon mission. 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 gone before.

Weissman then asks Houston, “If you wanted to go in remotely and check out… those two views, that would be great.” Houston then confirms that they will log into his PCD and let the commander know “when we’re done.” The audio clip stops there, unfortunately, so we have no way of knowing whether Weisman was asked the immortal query whether he tried turning his computer off and on again before calling extraterrestrial IT support.

WIRED has contacted both NASA and Microsoft for a more detailed explanation of the email outage. Could Weisman have installed third-party add-ins that often conflict with Outlook, causing it to freeze or fail? Trello would obviously be useful, and Zoom seems adequate for a ship traveling at 17,500 miles per hour, or 4.9 miles per second.

Did someone send Weisman a high-resolution video file of NASA’s coverage of the launch, 6 hours and 22 minutes long, thus exceeding the OneDrive limit? Was Gmail better (especially now you can change your name)? How will he receive one of WIRED’s out-of-this-world newsletters if this difficult situation continues? Vital questions, all of them.

A Microsoft Outlook press representative said he may have some information from the company for us later today, and we’ll update this piece if we get that. NASA has not yet responded to this question, but it is understood that the agency is a bit busy at the moment.

Of course, as IT issues go, although not being able to access your email while drifting between 6,000 and 9,000 kilometers above the surface of the far side of the Moon is undoubtedly frustrating, it is undoubtedly on the smaller end of the spectrum of space-related software chaos.

In 1962, NASA’s Mariner 1 spacecraft was intentionally destroyed after launch due to a guidance system failure due to a single missing letter in a handwritten code, a hyphen, causing the Atlas Agena rocket to veer off course and give a destroy command after only 293 seconds of flight time. The cost of the mission failure was supposedly $18.5 million at the time, which is equivalent to more than $200 million today. This incident, famous in engineering circles, is often referred to as “the most expensive hyphen in history.”