Lol, we have officially arrived at the "Retards in Space" era. What a time to be alive!
this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2026
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I also have one! And it doesn't work.
No way in hell I would want to go to the moon nowadays. Technology these days is like having two left feet. Especially if AI is involved.
The article leaves out that this was on Commander Wiseman's personal tablet, a Microsoft Surface Pro and not any device associated with the mission.
He sought tech support for internet connectivity issues on a PCD (personal computing device), which is a Microsoft Surface Pro.
The 'Two Microsoft Outlooks' was a description of the issue he was having. The headline is implying that there are two machines running Outlook that don't work.
NASA detected that the PCD was actually on a network. It asked the commander for permission to connect to the tablet remotely so it could look into a problem with the Optimus software. "I also see that I have two Microsoft Outlooks and neither one of those are working," Wiseman responded, per a clip shared by Niki Grayson on Bluesky. "If you wanna remote in and check Optimus and those two Outlooks, that would be awesome."
The source of the quotes and a better article:
How fast is their internet connection? I didn't expect them to be able to "remote in", I thought the latency would be awful
In Earth orbit, there would be little latency. Starlink operates at ~500km and latency on that network is around 50ms. 'Traditional' internet satellites are in geosync orbit which is around 35,000 km, their latency is in the 250ms range.
At TLI (Translunar Injection) burn they were at 185km. They would have been a bit higher when the problem happened but their apogee was 2,600km, so they were somewhere in the 50-100ms range
They use the TDRS for data, it has a capacity of around 800Mbps but that is shared with the ISS.
So, their Internet connection is probably better than people using cellular data or Starlink. At the moon it'll be in the 2500ms range.
They're testing an optical system that would allow for much higher bandwidth, in the 100s of Gbps. The hardware that they're carrying will only do about 250Mbps but there are optical tricks they can do to increase that significantly once they confirm the base system works.
This is so interesting, thanks for sharing! :)
It is incredibly cool.
I was fully expecting the "New" dogwater web based Outlook client to be borked but the fact that classic is borked too is so fucking funny
I scanned through the next several minutes after this moment and didn’t hear them address the duplicate Outlooks again. So, I emailed the Artemis II communications team, who is definitely not busy today I’m sure, and asked: Can the astronauts check their email yet?
I’ll update if I hear back.
As expected
The spacecraft that took astronauts to the Moon used the Apollo Guidance Computer, developed by MIT's Instrumentation Laboratory.
Clock speed: Approximately 1 MHz
Memory: About 64 KB total
Word size: 16-bit architecture
Power consumption: About 55 watts
...how does 36KB RAM and 72KB ROM give you a total of 64KB?
Space dilation.
The AGC had 2048 words of erasable core storage, what we'd now call RAM, and 36,864 words of read only core rope memory. So a total of 38,912 words. Each word is 15 bits plus a parity bit, so that'd work out to 75,776 bytes or 72,168 bytes depending on whether you count parity or not, and then kilobytes, kibibytes...it's closer to 64k than 32 or 128.
Why the fuck would you use windows in mission critical spaces.
Yeah, that's no reason. That's fucking stupid.
You wouldn't and they didn't.
The article has just failed to inform the readers (the few that got past the headline), that this was on his personal Surface Tablet and not on anything associated with the mission.
Uhhh so they can see where they are
To have a nice Outlook on things
So they can rest while the Copilot handles stuff for a while
Imagine: You are the first human approaching the moon for a landing since 50+ years. Just a couple of seconds before touchdown the PC starts rebooting because an engineer clicked remind me later on earth and the PC registered that nobody moved the mouse or pressed a key for more than 3 nanoseconds so the user is surely AFK and has definitely nothing important going on so let’s close all open documents and reboot 🤷🏻♂️
There was a slight miscommunication at the fabrication stage. The requirement was to include windows and now they are in a windowless tube with two not functioning outlook accounts. Honest mistake, could happen to anyone
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The question is do they have a Copilot?
I hope not. If they ask it to summarize the email that Houston sends them, it could be a disaster.
I hope not. If they ask it to summarize the email that Houston sends them, ~~it could~~ will be a disaster.
FTFY
Nice April 1st. I mean that'd be almost as ridiculous as running nuclear subs on Windows, right? Long EOL'd versions at that, eh?
rustles papers
Oh.
On the stream you could very easily see his PIN code being put in, hopefully it's limited to that device!
Probably not, I'd imagine all the tablets have the same pin to make things easier.
Shit, I left my 2FA device at home!
"please provide fingerprint to verify"
Looks at glove
"Fuck"
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Why do they have any Microslop software?
What the article fails to mention is that this is on Commander Wiseman's personal Surface Pro and not on any mission-related systems.
My question exactly: The computers should be purpose-built, including the operating system.
Why TF aren't they using something like NASA Linux‽
If they made it open source you bet your ass they'd get shittons of free support from the global community! If they're running my software I'd be willing to hop on a call with the command center on any day at any hour!
"Yes, I know it's Christmas but NASA is having some trouble with a systemd script on a space ship that's currently in space..."
My question exactly: The computers should be purpose-built, including the operating system.
They are, mission critical systems are typically on a Unix/Linux base or completely custom built.
The systems that use Windows are the ones related to office work, like updating the crew's bank information and distributing pay.
Typically they're an rtos like vxworks.
Because a Microsoft sales rep bought a prostitute and cocaine for some senator.
Very likely that some degree of funding came from MS, usage of MS software is likely part of the contract.
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Not the best... outlook.
Should have used women with pencils again instead of MicroSlop.
https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/places-of-hidden-figures.htm
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So, just like here on Earth then.
Haha! Space travel, meet rolling releases.
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