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Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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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 I know the old outlook that is no longer being updated does.

Old Outlook still works and is supported until ~2029. We still use it here.

what is old Outlook? for me that's Outlook Express 6 :D

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.

This quote is completely and totally irrelevant. Nobody is saying they should code a new Outlook. If they did code something, it would be significantly smaller in scope and rigorously tested like spacebound programs in the past were. "New space-engineering-grade code created with actual engineering practices" is absolutely going to be more reliable than "old bloated commercial shitware". But I guess software engineering is a lost art, so it can't be helped.

It's also going to take a hell of a lot longer and cost more than buying an Outlook license. If I was lead on that project, you'd have an uphill battle trying to convince me that spending $100k+ on an email solution unless you can point to specific, serious deficiencies in the existing off the shelf solutions.

Software Engineering is far from a lost art: part of the practice is intelligently making cost-benefit decisions.

The current solution is literally causing problems in space. Space-grade engineering is expensive, but having things go wrong on your already very expensive mission is even more expensive.

Until we've had this failure, I do agree that using COTS software was the logical choice. And now we know better.

Sure, but people who didn't know better until this particular incident do not deserve the title "engineer". Being able to classify and manage risks before they happen is engineering 101.

Engineering requires working around constraints as well - and a major constraint of any project I've worked on was budget. If they wrote a new email client and it had some bug, we'd be laughing about why they didn't use one of the COTS email clients.

It’s a personal communication device. It’s not mission critical.

Alpine and mutt are about as far from bespoke as it gets. Both are far less likely to suffer from bugs than outlook.

Alpine and Mutt are about 20 and 30 years old, respectively.

And that problem would go away with a 30 year-old solution?

That problem would be much less likely with a minimalist battle tested OSS solution whose maintainers and users have decidedly different priorities than those governing something like outlook or even thunderbird.

The higher the stakes the more valuable minimalism becomes.

NASA is deep in Microsoft's stack. Meetings with NASA are the only time I have to use Teams

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