Before the Orion spacecraft even launched on Wednesday, NASA’s Artemis II moon mission — the first in fifty years — had already weathered a storm of complex challenges, like hydrogen and helium leaks, a faulty heat shield, and technical issues with its safety system. Now in space, these four brave astronauts face their most formidable obstacle yet: Microsoft Outlook.
In the first of their 10 planned days in space, Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman was having trouble using Microsoft Outlook, so he contacted Mission Control for tech support, according to the livestream of launch communications.
At first, Wiseman was having issues related to Optimus software, but then he flagged a more pedestrian concern: There were two instances of Outlook running on his personal computing device, or PCD — a Microsoft Surface Pro, per NASA.
“I also see that I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working. If you want to remote in and check Optimus and those two Outlooks, that would be awesome,” Wiseman said.
Soon after Wiseman reported the issue, Mission Control brought the astronaut some good news.
“We wanted to let Reid know we are done remoting into his PCD 1,” the person at Mission Control said. “We were able to resolve the issue for Optimus, and for Outlook, we were able to get it open. It will show offline, which is expected.”
What are astronauts even emailing about, anyway? Isn’t being in space reason enough to set an out-of-office response?
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This wasn’t the only earthly trial the astronauts faced. Soon after takeoff, their toilet malfunctioned.
“The toilet fan is reported to be jammed,” NASA spokesperson Gary Jordan said, according to a transcription from Space.com. “Now the ground teams are coming up with instructions on how to get into the fan and clear that area to revive the toilet for the mission.”
They did have “backup waste management capabilities,” according to Jordan, which is a relief. Worst case scenario, these astronauts would not have to live amongst floating fecal matter or anything (this is not a hypothetical concern). But nevertheless, our country’s foremost aerospace engineers managed to fix the toilet trouble, as well as Microsoft Outlook. And if they can manage that, they can surely circumnavigate the moon.
I’d ask NASA’s Mission Control if they could help me with my own Outlook woes, but they are probably a bit busy.
Neither NASA nor Microsoft responded to TechCrunch’s requests for comment.