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On Thursday, during Artemis II’s journey to the Moon, commander Reid Wiseman ran into a tech issue some of us back on Earth can relate to: Microsoft Outlook wasn’t working. In a conversation captured in NASA’s Artemis livestream and shared on Bluesky, Wiseman reported to Mission Control: “I also see that I have two Microsoft Outlooks and neither one of those are working.”
To take care of the issue, Mission Control had to remotely access Wiseman’s personal computing device (PCD), a Microsoft Surface Pro. During a press conference on Thursday, Artemis flight director Judd Frieling said NASA had fixed the issue, stating, “This is not uncommon. We have this on-station all the time. You know, sometimes Outlook has issues getting configured, especially when you don’t have a network that’s directly connected. And so essentially we just had to reload his files on Outlook to get it working.”
NASA uses a combination of its Near Space Network and Deep Space Network to stay in touch with Artemis II, relying on a mix of antennas around the world and satellites in orbit. Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas has to shift communications between these networks as Artemis II gets further away from Earth.
Aside from the Microsoft Surface Pro, the Artemis II crew’s gear list also includes Nikon D5 DSLR cameras, a ZCube video encoder, and handheld GoPro cameras for filming content for a Disney/National Geographic documentary. The crew was also allowed to bring their phones with them — you can even see their phones being stowed away in their spacesuit pockets in NASA’s livestream.