Earlier than they have been loaded into the Orion Spacecraft and propelled towards Earth’s moon by a NASA Area Launch System rocket, the crew members of the Artemis II mission had their Orion Crew Survival System fits outfitted with iPhones. In the photograph above, commander Reid Wiseman is having his iPhone 17 Professional Max stuffed into his shin pocket.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman frames this as a win, and I’m not essentially arguing in any other case. The estimated value of the Artemis program is roughly $90 billion. The legendary NASA “space pen” fable, correct or not, has created a shared understanding of NASA as a spot the place every little thing prices an excessive amount of cash. Isaacman says the adoption of a bit of tech that prices no more than $2,000 “challenged long-standing processes and certified fashionable {hardware} for spaceflight on an expedited timeline.”
NASA astronauts will quickly fly with the newest smartphones, starting with Crew-12 and Artemis II. We are giving our crews the instruments to seize particular moments for his or her households and share inspiring photos and video with the world. Simply as vital, we challenged long-standing…
— NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman (@NASAAdmin) February 5, 2026
According to the New York Times, all the approach again in 2011, the last area shuttle mission concerned an experiment that required an iPhone 4s, and passengers on personal area flights have used smartphones. However these modified iPhones that reportedly can’t join to the web or bluetooth are nonetheless a unique type of milestone: they’re the first iPhones in area that seem like they’re getting used just a little an excessive amount of.
See for your self. NASA makes terrific day by day footage compilations that present what the crew is doing up there, and you can’t miss the iPhone usage in Saturday’s video (from which I’ve pulled the photos on this article). It stands to purpose that the crew is conversant in iPhones from utilizing them day in and day trip on Earth. Taking pictures with an iPhone whilst you’re on the approach to the moon sounds straightforward and enjoyable.
However computational smartphone pictures is controversial, since, in its eagerness to ship eye-pleasing pictures, it could current mind-bending distortions of actuality that arguably create one thing more akin to a photo illustration than a photograph. Critics accuse some onboard AI methods of inventing details that weren’t in proof on the unique topic—and hilariously enough this sometimes involves the moon. One hopes the digital camera software program in the official NASA iPhone Professional Max has been tweaked to guarantee documentary constancy.
(Gizmodo reached out to NASA for remark about this, and we are going to replace this article in the event that they reply.)
As many individuals observed early in the mission, nonetheless, astronauts are additionally utilizing a lot much less in style shopper tech up there than an iPhone.
On the first day of the lunar flyby mission, Wiseman referred to as Houston to troubleshoot one thing referred to as Optimus on his glitching private computing system or “PCD”—truly a Microsoft Floor Professional pill. “I additionally see that I’ve two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither a kind of are working. In order for you to distant in and examine Optimus and people two Outlooks, that may be superior,” Wiseman mentioned.
A Bluesky post about this went viral, and it’s no thriller why. Everybody who has ever had an workplace job can relate to having issues with Outlook, a notoriously dreary piece of quotidian software. Luckily it appears to be like like resolving an IT downside once you’re a lunar astronaut doesn’t contain placing a pin in that and circling again, as a result of the Outlook glitch was resolved almost immediately.
NASA says the Floor pill is “Used for PFCs [or private family conferences], PMCs [private medical conferences], workplace apps, DSLR imagery storage, [and] viewing recorded stills/movies on digital camera controllers.”
However a fast scan of the footage NASA printed Saturday reveals the astronauts are busy tapping away at their tablets seemingly as a lot as doable.
They’re holding them like clipboards, and so they definitely don’t seem like they’re taking part in Slay the Spire on them.
I suppose this is progress of a form, because it permits for a much less cluttered aesthetic than we’re accustomed to in photos of area missions—no less than when a few of the tubes and wires recede from view. A 2006 pdf from NASA reveals what comparable work duties used to seem like for NASA and Russia’s Roscosmos, and it evidently concerned a ton of 8 1/2 x 11 sheets of paper. One photograph of Cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko utilizing the communication system on the Worldwide Area Station (ISS) appears to be like notably worrying and maximalist.
These aren’t infants, and I’m not anxious about the astronauts’ psychological growth. In reality, astronauts are well-known for his or her psychological stability (usually at least) and their capacity to stand up to extremes. Even when the astronauts did, worst case situation, hack their tablets and telephones to let them binge on algorithmic slop whereas they’re in area, I’m pretty assured the mission would nonetheless go simply effective.
But when we actually are heading into an age of frequent lunar missions, and maybe interplanetary missions involving multiyear spaceflights, seeing the astronauts on such acquainted glowing rectangles is just a little deflating. Flying round in area is the archetypal peak human expertise. In a saner actuality, nothing the astronauts ever do up there—not even the boring stuff—would look something like me in an airport terminal.
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