It also meant the loss of dozens of experiments. One of more exotic of these was Sidekick; a project by NASA and Microsoft that uses the latter's HoloLens technology to provide astronauts with their own holographic augmented reality.

One problem that manned space missions have faced since the first Vostok and Mercury flights is tiny crews having to deal with a workload so great that some, such as on Skylab, have rebelled. Unlike on a naval vessel where experts and artificers in dozens of fields make up the crew, astronauts on the ISS and planned deep space missions are expected to handle tasks well outside their métier on a daily basis. One day they may be required to install a robot, the next tend a greenhouse, and the next fix a zero-gravity toilet. Even with the brightest personnel and the best training, that still means a lot of help from Earthside experts at mission control.