Spacesuit needed to be turned off and on again

On Tuesday, June 16th, during a spacewalk… a spacesuit had to be rebooted.

Because, among other things, the display and controls weren’t working right.

To be clear: This is absolutely real and not a joke.

From NASA: “About three hours into today’s spacewalk, NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough made his way back to the Quest airlock at the International Space Station to reconnect his spacesuit to an umbilical connection and restarted it. The reset corrected the issues with his spacesuit’s display and controls module that provides him information about the status of his spacesuit.”

In the absence of specific information as to the cause of the software needing to be rebooted, we are left to speculate. I see two possibilities:

The spacesuit lost bluetooth connection to the controller orWindows 10 had completed installing updates and needed to restart.

Regardless of the cause, it’s reassuring to know that, in the future — when we are all travelling in space — the guys on the I.T. Crowd will still have a job.