GoKawiilBefore the Orion spacecraft even launched on Wednesday, NASA’s Artemis II moon mission — the first in 50 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.
right now the astronauts are calling houston because the computer on the spaceship is running two instances of microsoft outlook and they can't figure out why. nasa is about to remote into the computer — niki grayson (@nikigrayson.com) 2026-04-02T06:06:53.835Z
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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