Artemis II: Christina Koch's PCD Failure

4 points by robgibbons 35 days ago | 2 comments

Early in the Artemis 2 Mission, Christina Koch's PCD (personal computing device, essentially a Surface tablet) completely failed to power on, and Houston had her attempt to perform a hard reset (hold down the power button, and the volume up button) several times, later having her remove the SD card and try again, at one point referring to last ditch efforts to get it running as a "hail-mary."

These efforts were ultimately unsuccessful, and this equipment failure led to the crew having to share three working PCDs between the four of them for all of their work for the entire remaining duration of the mission. They were able to make this configuration work, albeit not without complications. Their PCDs were their direct means of tracking their jobs, documenting their work, running checklists, looking up procedures, etc. During the lunar fly-by in particular, while they were doing photography of their various lunar targets, they said that they had to swap out SD cards as they rotated between window duty every so often. Two of them kept their own PCD, and the other two shared one. Houston originally asked that they try to use separate directories with their initials to track their work in case they were sharing SDs.

It's obvious that they were able to make things work, but this issue also complicated their operational logistics, and it's funny that it wasn't reported on at all. If you look up anything related to technical glitches or equipment failures on the Artemis II mission, it's all about Outlook and the toilet. Nothing about the complete failure of the PCD. No reports on this, not even a single blog post I can find.

ggm 35 days ago |

At the cost of complexity, should they have had platform diversity, and so e.g. a small iPad or an Android tablet?

Or .. a spare? I guess the "spare" here was "use somebody else's"

I hope they selected diverse production runs. I have been exposed to "yea, that generation of thinkpad had bad PSU, sorry" problems in the past.

g4cg54g54 35 days ago |

not to mention that "the outlook failure" seems to have been a layer 8 problem?

(think i picked up some line about not being aware how to use it in offline mode / calling this out as an "error" while it was the expected configuration at the time)

and the toilet problem being as banal as "well, you need to wait for the green ready light to turn on..." (and this just taking a bit longer than expected on the first go)