Comment by mrweasel
14 days ago
> Yes they need to get email in space. It's easy way to send documents back and forth.
To me that's probably much more interesting. We assume they have all this fancy NASA tech, probably some special communication protocols, but nope, email is fine. Still not sure why they'd use Outlook, but I guess it's easier than retraining astronauts on Alpine or Mutt.
How long did the US military rely on mIRC... decades, maybe they still do?
US Military still uses IRC/mIRC for similar reasons. Easy to self host and it's low bandwidth.
Wow I remember that from late OIF. Fascinating that they're still using it!
If they have stock outlook they are doing normal networking and are connected to the normal internet over some deep-space antenna setup. So why not just use Debian and gmail in the browser if you want easy? The ISS uses Debian. I can't believe it's too hard to get astronauts to open Firefox
The browser would be far too slow for practical use. Local fist software, which ironically outlook is, would be the way to go.
Does the modern PWA-based outlook even support offline access? I know the old outlook that is no longer being updated does.
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Gmail is not an Outlook replacement. Gsuite as a whole has more or less the required pieces, but there is no single google product that covers the feature set of Outlook + Exchange.
I'd ask the opposite question. Why would they not use Outlook and instead use something like Alpine or Mutt? This is 2026, you know.
Is this incident not reason enough? Astronauts in space are needing remote support to debug it, and taking up priceless mission time.
Sure, but bespoke software isn't necessarily going to be more reliable.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
> The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they’ve been fixed.
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And that problem would go away with a 30 year-old solution?
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NASA is deep in Microsoft's stack. Meetings with NASA are the only time I have to use Teams