A wonky toilet, Microsoft Outlook obstacles and more: The unexpected issues popping up on the Artemis II moon mission

Artemis II is a test flight. That means that for all of the groundbreaking science crew members have conducted during their journey, one of their main goals is simply to see how all of the new systems and technologies that have been developed for the mission perform when they’re actually sent into outer space.

For the most part, things have gone remarkably well. The most important systems that need to work — like propulsion, navigation and life support — have operated with very few issues. But that doesn’t mean everything has gone as hoped.

Despite the years that NASA spent planning the mission, there were inevitably going to be hiccups along the way. These are some of the small, and in some cases extremely relatable, problems that have arisen for the Artemis II crew during their journey around the moon and back.

Email issues

On the first day of the mission, the astronauts dealt with a challenge that has plagued so many of us Earth-bound office workers: Needing tech support to fix their wonky work email.

In audio shared via NASA’s livestream, mission commander Reid Wiseman can be heard asking ground control for help with his personal computer, a Microsoft Surface Pro.

“I also see that I have two Microsoft Outlooks and neither one of those are working,” he says, referring to Microsoft’s notoriously finicky email application. Wiseman then asks engineers on the ground to “remote in” in hopes that they can fix the problem, which NASA later said they were able to do.

The email issues forced Wiseman to ask mission control to tell his children to send him messages via the other crew members’ accounts “so I can at least talk to them.”

“This is not uncommon,” Artemis flight director Judd Frieling said on Thursday. “You know, sometimes Outlook has issues getting configured, especially when you don’t have a network that’s directly connected. And so essentially we just had to reload his files on Outlook to get it working.”

Bluetooth struggles

During a video that was intended to show pilot Victor Glover using the onboard exercise device, mission specialist Christina Koch can be heard talking with ground control about her struggles getting a device to connect via Bluetooth.

“No joy [in] seeing the device in the list of available devices when I attempt to re-pair it,” she says.

We don’t have details on what exactly the issue was or whether it was resolved, but it’s pretty relatable to see that traveling hundreds of thousands of miles away from Earth isn’t enough to escape the minor tech problems we deal with at home.

Toilet troubles

Perhaps the most serious issue that the Artemis II crew has faced so far has been a stopped-up toilet. A few hours after lift off on Wednesday, the spacecraft’s state-of-the-art toilet began malfunctioning.

First, the water pump wasn’t working correctly. Then, urine wasn’t being vented properly. At one point, the crew reported a burning smell coming from the restroom area. Rick Henfling, the Artemis II entry flight director, said Thursday that the toilet is still operational, but that the challenge they’re working through is evacuating the wastewater tank.

To reduce the amount of maintenance that they’d need to do on the high-tech toilet, the crew was advised to sometimes use a less sophisticated backup — the Collapsible Contingency Urinal, effectively just a bag to pee in.

“I’m proud to call myself the space plumber,” Koch said on Thursday. “We were all breathing a sigh of relief when it turned out to be just fine.”

The Orion’s toilet, for all of its hiccups, is a big leap forward from the system used in past lunar missions, which relied exclusively on bags. That low-tech system led to a notorious incident in 1969, when astronauts on the Apollo 10 mission reported “a turd floating through the air.”

A 2007 NASA report described the old toilet process as only “marginally functional” and “distasteful” for the crew.

“Defecation was difficult to perform without the crew soiling themselves, clothing, and the cabin,” the report read. “The bags provided no odor control in the small capsule and the odor was prominent.”

While potty problems are always at least a little bit funny, having a functioning commode is critical, especially for NASA’s plans to conduct long-distance space travel. “If the toilet breaks on the way to Mars, there is a non-zero chance the crew is dying,” Eric Berger, a senior space editor at Ars Technica, wrote last week.

Climate control hiccups

Any worker who has ever wondered why their office is always so freezing can empathize with the Artemis II crew, which asked mission control to try to find ways to warm up the capsule several times during the first few days of the mission.

“It is very cold in the cabin,” Koch said during a morning debrief on day two. “Any chance you can make it warmer or reduce the cabin fan speed a bit more?”

Mission control responded by telling the crew that it had made an adjustment to increase the temperature while they were sleeping but would “take a look” at other options for making the cabin more comfortable.

The cabin temperature reportedly started out in the mid-70s but dipped about 10 degrees cooler over time. Mission control was eventually able to get the cabin back to its intended temperature.

“We got a lot more comfortable," Glover said.

Sunshine snafus

For all of the billions that were spent on the Orion spacecraft, its crew was forced to rely on a very cheap solution to a problem that arose on day four of the mission.

At one point, the module was in a position where the sun’s rays were hitting the spacecraft’s windows so strongly that mission control became concerned the shades on the window might become too hot. They requested that the crew remove the shades, but that created an issue of its own: Without the shades in place, the sun became overwhelmingly bright in the cabin.

Mission control offered a simple fix.

“We want to encourage you to use a T-shirt in the cabin or something similar, if needed, to block out that sunlight,” it said.

The T-shirts worked, and they were used going forward whenever the crew needed some relief from the sun.