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Article Pulled from Lunduke's blog - I've added my general thoughts throughout ^{[blog here]}

On Friday.  August, 9th.  1991. The crew of STS-43 -- the 9th mission of Space Shuttle Atlantis -- sent the first E-Mail... from outer space. "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! Have a nice day…… Hasta la vista, baby,… we’ll be back!"

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And, yes. That email included variations on Arnold Schwarzenegger's catchphrases -- "Hasta la vista, baby,... we'll be back!" -- from Terminator 2: Judgment Day, which had opened in theaters just the month before the shuttle mission.

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The software used was AppleLink -- an On-Line Service from Apple primarily used by Apple dealers, software developers, and enthusiasts.  Based on the date, it seems highly likely that this would have been using AppleLink version 6.1. (As no external links were available to the Internet at the time)

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Now, technically, AppleLink didn't call their messages "E-Mails".  They called them "Memos".  But, really, they were the same thing.  And this is what composing one of those messages looked like.

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And, once you hit "Send", this is the window you would be presented with.

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While this was the first E-Mail sent from Space... it took a few tries to get it to work.

1. On the first try an error saying "The modem pool is not responding" appeared.  This was, apparently, caused by a data switching system going to sleep.  So they restarted that data switching system.
2. On the second try... the data switching system... had not restarted properly.  It needed another round of "Turn it off and back on again."  Seriously.
3. But the third try... that one worked!  The E-Mail sent!  From Space!

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