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Comment by starkparker | Hacker News Reader

https://www.businessinsider.com/artemis-astronauts-microsoft...

> After Wiseman flagged the issue, Mission Control said it could remotely access his system with permission.

> Soon after, a member of Mission Control said, "We wanted to let Reid know we are done remoting into his PCD 1." They added that the issue had been resolved and that the system would appear offline, as "expected."

> The personal computing device, or PCD, is how the crew accesses the internet during the flight and tracks its timeline, NASA said on the livestream. The device used on the mission is the MS Surface Pro, per an Artemis II factsheet.

The factsheet:

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20230017638/downloads/13...

> Used for PFCs (private family conference), PMCs (private medical communication/conference), office apps, DSLR imagery storage, viewing recorded stills/videos on camera controllers

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I love the idea that even on a mission to the moon the crew still needs to allocate a portion of their time to click through cookie consent banners, non skippable ads and fighting with windows update! Probably part of the effort to make the environment similar to life on earth to make the long trip more bearable.

"Meet hot local singles in Moon Orbit today!"

https://xkcd.com/713/

This would be the funniest scene, at the last moments of the movie "Artemis: Forward to the past"

Notably, it looks like it came down to the Surface Pro and Dell XPS 15, and part of the reason why the Surface won was "significantly more particulate and quantities of toxic gases" emitted by the XPS's larger battery in the worst-case scenario of a battery fire: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20210013869/downloads/20...

> The six key test configurations are shown in Table D-2. A ¼-scale OSEF was used in place of a full-scale unit. Performance results were assessed accordingly. The Orion Program is considering flying one of two different laptop models, a Surface Pro or a Dell XPS 15. Both were tested during this test series. Sealed and unsealed OFC prefilters also were tested.

...

> Testing revealed that the rise in temperature is directly related to the number of cells ignited. Maximum temperature rise inside the CBA during a Dell XPS 15 fire was 22 °F. The maximum temperature rise inside the CBA during a Surface Pro fire was 7 °F. Figure D-13 shows the relative temperature rises for several tests.

...

> - When larger numbers of laptop cells were ignited, higher concentrations of toxic gases, increased particulate densities, and greater production of thermal energy were observed.

> - The larger the number of laptop battery cells ignited, the more likely the ammonia concentration was to reach levels capable of potentially poisoning the OSEF CO oxidation catalyst.

You don't need installing windows on surface pro -- do you?

I’ve tried Linux on an older surface pro. It sucks, pen/touch is not reliable, the device wouldn’t shut off properly which drained the battery. But I guess NASA would have the budget to resolve that.

Kinda curious what model/when you tried it. I recently picked up a dirt-cheap Surface Go 2 and everything I've tried works great ootb including pen/touch, at least with Gnome, which was very surprising. Runs way smoother than the Win11 it came with too.

From my limited understanding it seems like a few years ago you needed a separate kernel for at least that model but nowadays everything's upstreamed seemingly.

Surface Pro 4, it is an older model, so it cannot run Win11. Indeed I needed a custom kernel.

I’m still quite happy with Win10 though.

I’ll have a look at Linux again.

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