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Using Outlook From Orbit
Pigskin-Referee writes with this excerpt from Office Watch: "On the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station they use Microsoft Outlook 2003, but not quite in the same way that us earthbound Earthlings do. The space shuttle Atlantis is orbiting the earth right now and the crew exchange emails with the ground a few times each day. Bandwidth is a constraint and you don't want the busy crewmembers bothered with spam or unnecessary messages so NASA has a special system in place. The crew use fairly standard laptops running Microsoft Outlook (currently Outlook 2003) with Exchange Server as the email host, but they don't link to the server using any of the standard methods."
When NASA first started sending up astronauts, they quickly discovered that Mozilla thunbird would not work in zero gravity.
To combat the problem, NASA scientists spent a drunken weekend and $12 billion on Microsoft Outlook and Exchange licensing to develop a mail server that works in zero gravity, upside down, covered in stale beer, and old pizza boxes, and at temperatures ranging from below 10 to 25 degrees Celsius.
The Russians used Mutt.
For all those years i wanted to shoot outlook into outer space, and they already did...
Just knowing Windows is running in space kind of gives me the willies.
I am a Martian prince from the Splugorthian region of the Xylerom. I have inherited a bountiful estate worth 1.8345E8 drow'xlian that I must hide from the ruthless Prxyzzilic crime family. I am willing to share 20% of my fortune with you will allow me to deposit fund in your account. Please send me your account information if you wish to do business. Live long and prosper! Prince Ryzzriwz
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Ground control to Major Tom, ... ...
your laptop's dead, there's something wrong!
Can you read me, Major Tom?
Can you read me, Major Tom?
Can you
Here, I'm sitting at my laptop
far above the world.
My laptop's screen turned blue,
and there's nothing I can do
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
...to use Microsoft software.
Because there’s limited bandwidth up to the shuttle it’s important to keep the OST fairly small so occasionally you’ll hear NASA controllers ask the crew to clean out their Outlook files
They ask them, over a realtime voice connection, to clean out their Outlook files to save bandwidth. That's like sending "You've got mail" as a WAV file after transmitting a 1kB mail file.
They have to be very careful in a close environment such as the shuttle or the space station to keep the air healthy. Using mailx like you do would give off too much smug for their filters and cleaners to handle.
...I can understand the link, but why would I want to GZIP my gold?
The question then is why use Outlook for such an awkward, for that tool, setup?
It came pre-installed on the shuttle computers?
We also would have accepted 'UUCP'.
[weeps nostalgically]
Dear gawd. can you imagine typing the "bang path" to get your mail to the ISS?
The idea of NASA ground control needing to tell astronauts to "close outlook" on their massively expensive mil-spec laptops so they can do file transfers of OST files gives me acid reflux.