Howdy, it’s Joey, back with more Fun Fact Friyay. Today’s fact is intergalactic, but first…
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The STS-43 Atlantis crew sent the first email from space in 1991, with a message that included a Terminator reference.
Yesterday, Microsoft had a major global outage that is still going on in parts of the world today. The company attributed the outage to an “elevated load” of traffic, rather than any cybersecurity incident.
Still, it was panic and/or jubilation across offices. Outlook was down, so people weren’t getting emails. Teams was down, so people couldn’t chat with each other. Copilot was down, so you couldn’t summarize a meeting you weren’t paying attention to. Even Minecraft was down, which I did not even realize had an association with Microsoft.
Perhaps most devastating of all, Clippy was nowhere to be found.
The memes and witty comments came a la Vin Diesel, i.e. fast and furious. My favorite was this gif from The Simpsons with no additional commentary.
Magnifique. 😚👌
The first email dates back to 1971, when ARPANET employee Ray Tomlinson was tinkering with ways humans and computers could interact.
At the time, the telephone was the primary method of communication. Tomlinson developed several elements of email still in use today, such as the “@” symbol and fields for the sender, date, subject line, and body.
Tomlinson wasn’t sure what his first email message was, because at the time, he thought he had just made something kind of neat.
“I sent a number of test messages to myself from one machine to the other. The test messages were entirely forgettable and I have, therefore, forgotten them,” he said.
It turns out he was creating the most ubiquitous form of communication around the world.
Twenty years later, the STS-43 Atlantis was undergoing a trip of a little less than nine days. They did a handful of experiments on the flight, but we’re most interested in one thing.
On August 9, 1991, astronauts Shannon Lucid and James C. Adamson sent the first-ever email from space.
They composed their prose on an Apple Macintosh Portable and sent it over the AppleLink network. Their recipient: Marcia Ivans, who was at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, USA.
Unlike Tomlinson, we have an accurate record of what the message said:
“Hello Earth! Greetings from the STS-43 Crew. This is the first AppleLink from space. Having a GREAT time, wish you were here, … send cryo and RCS! Hasta la vista, baby, … we’ll be back!”
“Cryo” is not a typo for “crypto,” thankfully. It’s cryogenics, the super-cold liquid gases that help propel spacecraft. Similarly, RCS (Reaction Control System) is a system of thrusters that control a spacecraft’s orientation, rotation, and minor movements.
So, uh…perhaps a bit of a dire message if the spacecraft was lacking both of those elements? Thankfully, STS-43 Atlantis landed safely two days later, on August 11, 1991.
Of course, the most notable part of this message is the reference to Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Arnold Schwarzenegger, as the titular Terminator, delivers “Hasta la vista, baby” after John Connor teaches him how to use it. He also says “I’ll be back” when a police station won’t let him in, and then he drives a car through the front door.
Both of those lines have become commonplace in pop culture, and one of them almost didn’t happen.
Schwarzenegger has said he had trouble pronouncing “I’ll” and asked director James Cameron if he could say “I will be back.” Cameron said no, but he offered Schwarzenegger as many takes as he needed to get it right. It’s nice to be accommodating.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day came out on July 3, 1991, less than a month before the flight initially took off.
That means that it’s been at least 35 years of men endlessly reciting movie quotes with each other.
May your weekend have at least one memorable moment you recall fondly down the road.