If someone is running even important tasks that must not be interrupted, much less critical infrastructure like this, on consumer versions of Windows they're absolute idiots and should never be trusted with those sorts of decisions again.
If one insists on using Windows for uninterruptible tasks they should be using a server edition.
That said I'd always recommend
> Recently heard about an Antarctic base that lost heating for 36 hears after a Windows Update triggered a several GB download over the base's modem downlink.
That seems implausible, or at least to have been miscommunicated. The download and install phases are separate, so nothing would have gone down until the download completed. If the heating system required constant communication and went down due to not enough bandwidth being left over that's obviously a very poor design in general, especially in Antarctica. Even if that were somehow the case, it wouldn't take 36 hours for their network team to block/throttle the update traffic to let it work again.
The server edition can also be configured to perform automatic updates.
It doesn't involve Windows as far as I can tell - they don't say what the cause of the problem was.
https://www.bas.ac.uk/media-post/update-power-down-at-britis...
My guess is that the heater was being run by the machine that required the update and the update download process meant the machine was not available for usual operation. But I don't really know.
I've been researching this. There was an outage. It wasn't caused by Windows. What is your source for this claim?
> Halley lost power on 30 July after the station’s generators overheated and shut down after a large coolant leak from the main arterial pipe in the station’s heating system.
https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/research-on-ice-at-briti...
I cannot find any other Antarctic outages.
The only thing those satalites need to do is, accept signal, do math, and transmit signal.
I don't see why you would use Windows for this.
However, it's more than likely that there's a bunch of Windows machines on the ground segment side of the operation, since a lot of satellite fleet management software is Windows based.
No.
But for some reason the op implied windows was to blame without evidence.
I mentioned the implausibly of it.
Op is misleading people.