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Comment by AIorNot | Hacker News Reader

guys former NASA Mission Control Web Tool Team and OCA here (Orbital Comms Adapter office which was a backroom position)

Crews have been using thinkpad laptops (personal laptops since the 2005) on the ISS and Shuttle. Artemis is likely an extension of this

Laptops go through a long space hardening and verification process. Windows and Outlook is the result of that

We used to do "Mail Syncs" which taking the outlook file and pushing it up to the crews laptop doing a comm window via TDRSS network -that how astronauts got their email

is this high tech - no -does it work and been done for years yes.

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> guys former NASA Mission Control Web Tool Team and OCA here

Wow, very cool and lot's of respect!

But... why not use linux, unix, custom OS, iPad, Android, Nintendo SNES, Atari, Commodore 64... anything BUT Microsoft?

(Seriously though, why not Linux? I'd really appreciate if you could answer, thank you! )

Well as to why they were chosen back in the STS (shuttle) era (before my time) see a good history on the decision here: https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=27043.0

1. In the space program decisions are made years before and changes are very difficult owing to a myriad of reasons from procedures to paperwork, eg there was a whole mirror lab setup on the ground To support them etc

2. Astronauts/Aerospace operationally often come from defense world - they are used to windows - see DoD -that battle was fought in the 80s/90s

3. Once something is a part of the space program it takes on a life of its own/ we had an IIS webserver onboard the ISS for example and also apache tomcat - we (myself wrote software for both) using .NET and Java

4. Training and operational software and docs were all MS Office variety for years (were talking from floppy disk era here)

5. Lot of other linux/unix based systems too this is is just crew support laptops - not considered mission critical

But how can we square that claim with the fact that they're having bog standard broken IT issues .... in space? What kind of "space hardening" process results in the mission having problems like this so quickly?

Id assume the result of hardening and verification prcoess would be entirely removing those softwares and everything they bring with them. Fork a Linux Distro, NASOS or whatever, adapt it perfectly to your needs and you'll have a software that you can work on for 100 years with full control and security at your hands.

The market then will change and new trends and stupid fads will come and pass, the distro and all its software youve made, will stay the same.

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