Even NASA Has Trouble With Windows

Here at Never Not Funny, this particular staff member is something of an astrogeek. Yes, in my junior high days I even attended Space Camp. I will now pause for the obligatory period of mockery (or "OPM" as NASA, who has an acronym for everything, calls it).

[Standing by for OPM passage.]

Okay, now with that out of the way, for the humorous tidbit.

I've been listening to NASA-TV throughout the duration of the Hubble Space Telescope repair mission flown by space shuttle Atlantis - [pause for second OPM] - and was tuned in today for the expected re-entry and landing. Weather has prohibited landing today but, being the geek I am, continued listening to mostly static or silence. The crew has found themselves with an unexpected day in space and really had nothing to do as far as scheduled activities.

So, what do they do with the free time on their hands? Watch movies! Or, at least they attempted to watch movies. The following slightly paraphrased exchange suddenly came over the comm-link between the shuttle and Mission Control in Houston:

Andrew Feustel, spacewalker on the shuttle: Houston, Atlantis.
Alan Poindexter at Mission Control: Go ahead, Drew.
Shuttle: Yeah Dex, we're trying to watch a couple of DVDs here on the laptop and we're getting an error indicating something isn't loaded on here that needs to be.
Mission Control: OK, Drew. We'll talk about it here. Sounds like a codec or something.

After a half-hour or so of Mission Control working on it, they figured the only way to correct it was to unpack a system that had been put away for the landing in order to upload the files they'd need to install so they could watch the movies. The crew decided they'd just watch some MPEGs they had and listen to music during their dinner meal instead.

So, NASA can send spacecraft all over the solar system, put people on the Moon, launch spacecraft into orbit which are capable of catching and meeting up with other spacecraft, but they can't get Windows to work either. It's comforting, to some degree, that the best technology minds in the country, yea the world, can't get their DVDs to play either.

It's not just me.