The incident that occurred Red Wisemanmission commander Artemis IIwith Outlook On the second day of his trip to the Moon, with two accounts that were not working at first, he drew attention to the device on which he was using them, Microsoft Surface Pro. This is the first generation of the convertible or two-in-one laptop in the line. Microsoft Surface that came out there 2013. An ‘old’ technology to take to space, but the POT There are practical reasons for using such old hardware. He has explained them Jason Huttprogram engineering and systems integration manager Orionin a series of publications on the Bluesky social network.
The first reason why an astronaut is sent to space in 2026 with a computer that came to market with Windows 8although it is upgradeable to Windows 10are the successive delays of the Artemis program.
When Hutt began working on Orion cockpit integration it was 2017with a release date planned for 2020. It was then that the devices that the astronauts would use were chosen. ‘The planned 2020 launch was pushed back to 2022, then 2024, and finally 2026, and we knew these devices would be obsolete by the time we launched them’explains in Bluesky.
Let’s talk about how this works and why we have older devices. When I started doing cabin integration back in 2017, we actually had a 2020 launch date. We bought the tablets the crew used for Artemis II back then. To not spend as much, we limited our choice to devices that were in the ISS catalog.
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— Jason Hutt (@jthutt.bsky.social) April 2, 2026, 7:17 p.m.
According to the NASA engineer, other reasons are testing, cost and reliability. Space hardware is not something that can be replaced every year like a smartphone. Each and every component must go through rigorous certification and testing processes, which takes years and costs a fortune. So, once a device has been approved, NASA maintains it. ‘We already had them on hand. They were already tested. The software was already developed for that platform. We just decided it was enough.’says Hutt.
In fact, for missions like Artemis, NASA deliberately chose devices that had already been used in the International Space Station. This avoided the need to re-certify new hardware, saving time and money, and explains why the device is Windows. ‘The tablet operations software was developed in Windows for the ISS, so we needed a Windows tabletsays Hutt.
This fondness for old hardware is common in space missions. NASA usually prefers it because it is well proven and has been proven to work in extreme environments, such as space, where radiation is intense. Newer technology may be faster, but also involves more risks and is less predictable.
There are also practical limitations. Deep space missions do not have a reliable internet connection like on Earth, so software cannot depend on constant connectivity. Add to that the bandwidth restrictions and data limits on communications with a ship in space, modern systems, so dependent on the cloud, no longer make sense. In other words, space is not the place to experiment with the latest gadgets, but rather to take what has been tested, proven to work, and proven to be reliable.