Even in space, Outlook finds a way
About seven hours into the Artemis II flight, Commander Reid Wiseman ran into a problem that feels far too familiar to anyone who has ever opened Microsoft Outlook and been personally betrayed by it. His email stopped working.
During a conversation with mission control in Houston, Wiseman can be heard saying he had “two Microsoft Outlooks [on his PCD], and neither one of those are working.” In this case, PCD means Personal Computing Device, the specialized laptops or tablets used by Artemis astronauts to handle certain tasks during the 10-day mission to the moon, including email access. The devices are an important part of how the four-person crew will manage mission data and communicate during a lunar flyby that will take them farther into space than any humans have gone before.
Wiseman then asked Houston, “If you want to remote in and check ... those two Outlooks that would be awesome.” Houston replied that they would log into his PCD and let the commander “know when we are done.” That is where the audio clip ends, which is a shame, because the world has a right to know whether anyone asked the most timeless question in troubleshooting: have you tried turning it off and on again?
The cosmic help desk is on the case
WIRED reached out to both NASA and Microsoft for more details about the email outage. One can only hope the diagnosis is more sophisticated than “have you considered restarting the universe.”
Could Wiseman have installed third-party add-ins that did not get along with Outlook and caused the whole thing to freeze? Maybe Trello would help. Zoom also feels oddly appropriate for a spacecraft traveling at 17,500 mph, or 4.9 miles per second.
Or perhaps someone sent him a very large video file, maybe the full 6 hours and 22 minutes of NASA’s launch coverage, and pushed him past his OneDrive limit. It is also possible that Gmail would have been the better choice, especially now that names can be changed there. And if the problem continues, how exactly is Wiseman supposed to receive one of WIRED’s newsletters from space? Truly, the questions pile up.
Microsoft’s Outlook press representative said the company may have more information later in the day, and that the story would be updated if it does. NASA had not responded at the time of writing, which is understandable given that the agency has slightly larger priorities at the moment.
A small inconvenience by space standards
As software failures go, not being able to access your email while floating thousands of kilometers above the far side of the moon is annoying, but it is not exactly the worst thing that has ever happened in spaceflight.
One of the most famous examples of a mission going wrong came in 1962, when NASA’s Mariner 1 spacecraft was intentionally destroyed after launch because of a guidance system failure traced to a single missing character in handwritten code: a hyphen. That tiny error caused the Atlas Agena rocket to stray off course and triggered the destruct command after just 293 seconds of flight.
The failure reportedly cost $18.5 million at the time, which would be more than $200 million today. In engineering circles, it is still remembered as “the most expensive hyphen in history.” A painful title, and one no software update has managed to beat.
