NASA to send another HoloLens to ISS on Dec. 3 after losing first one in June SpaceX explosion
Why NASA Wants Microsoft's HoloLens in Space — The rocket carrying two HoloLens headsets to the International Space Station blew up in June, and NASA is planning another launch.
Context & Ripple Effects
In June 2015, Microsoft and NASA announced the Sidekick partnership, meant to put two HoloLens headsets on the International Space Station so astronauts could get hands-free guidance during procedures and training. The June 28 SpaceX launch carrying both units was destroyed, wiping out the entire first shipment.
This article reports NASA's response: a replacement HoloLens is booked on a December 3 launch. In hindsight, the corpus shows where the device went — Microsoft later cancelled the planned second version (shuffling the HoloLens roadmap toward more ambitious 2019 hardware), scrapped HoloLens 3 entirely, and finally discontinued HoloLens 2 with no replacement.
First-order effects
- NASA's ISS crew loses months of Sidekick availability — the procedure-assistance and training use case waits on the December 3 re-flight rather than the original summer delivery.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft's enterprise pitch for HoloLens leans on extreme-environment deployments like the ISS as proof of durability; the destroyed shipment stalls that showcase until the replacement arrives on a SpaceX mission still recovering from the failure.
Third-order effects
- The long arc here runs from a flagship 2015 space partnership to a discontinued product line with no successor: high-profile institutional deployments proved not enough to sustain HoloLens hardware once Microsoft's roadmap narrowed, leaving NASA's use case tied to a device with an end-of-support date.
The trend: Mixed-reality hardware is retreating from ambitious platform bets even where marquee deployments like NASA's exist — a data point in the arc that ends with HoloLens 2's discontinuation.