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Astronaut's Email Fails en route to Moon
2 Apr
Summary
- Mission commander's Outlook email malfunctioned during lunar journey.
- Astronaut requested remote access to troubleshoot the PCD issue.
- Past space missions faced more critical software failures.
Approximately seven hours into the Artemis II mission to the moon, Commander Reid Wiseman encountered an issue familiar to many terrestrial users: his Microsoft Outlook email stopped functioning. Wiseman communicated with mission control in Houston, noting that both instances of Outlook on his Personal Computing Device (PCD) were not working. These PCDs are essential for the crew's communication and task management during their 10-day lunar flyby.
Wiseman requested that mission control remotely access his PCD to investigate the email outage. The audio recording of this exchange ends before confirming if basic troubleshooting steps, like restarting the device, were suggested. WIRED has reached out to NASA and Microsoft for further details on the cause of the email malfunction. The situation, while inconvenient, is a less severe software problem compared to historical space mission failures.
In 1962, the Mariner 1 spacecraft was destroyed shortly after launch due to a guidance system error caused by a missing hyphen in its code. This single character error led to a mission failure costing over $200 million in today's currency, earning it the moniker "the most expensive hyphen in history." Microsoft has indicated they might offer additional information regarding the Artemis II email issue.
