What you need to know
- The SpaceX Crew Dragon team experienced issues with an iPad.
- Astronaut Bob Behnken was having an issue with the custom SpaceX app.
- It turned out to be a caching issue solved through AirDrop.
SpaceX's Crew Dragon completed its mission over the weekend, but not without a bug affecting one of the iPads on board.
Reported by Space Explored, NASA astronaut Bob Behnken came across the issue, which SpaceX Crew Operations and Resources Engineer Anne Menon took up to troubleshoot. Behnken said he was experiencing an issue with the custom SpaceX application on his iPad Mini.
"A timeline application on my tablet, uh, gives me a error message that says Safari cannot open the page, and then it's got a HTML address because your iPad is not connected to the internet," Behnken reported. "Can you confirm that Wi-Fi is off and AirPlane Mode is on," asked Menon. Then the NASA astronaut improvised with a go-to troubleshooting step.
After troubleshooting, it was apparently determined to be a caching issue with the app. In order to fix the issue, the team had astronaut Doug Hurley take screenshots from his iPad and AirDrop them to Bob's iPad.
The issue with updating the digital timeline app was later determined to mostly likely be caused by a caching issue when saving an update. SpaceX eventually requested that astronaut Doug Hurley take screenshots of his day timeline as a backup in case his app experienced the same caching issue. Then each astronaut was instructed to briefly turn on wifi to enable the iPad's AirDrop feature for wirelessly sending the screenshots between iPads.
According to the team, the documents in question were also stored in Adobe Acrobat for iPad as well, so the issue was not a large one. It will, however, be something that needs to be fixed before the next crew launches.
You can watch the exchange between the crew below (it starts at around 4 hours and 16 minutes):
