Just a few days ago, specifically on February 11, the world watched as four astronauts climbed into a sleek SpaceX Dragon capsule and hurtled toward the International Space Station. To the casual observer, it looked like just another—though still undeniably cool—Crew-12 launch. But beneath the surface of those high-tech flight suits was something that would have been considered a major security breach just a few years back: the latest consumer smartphones. And no, they aren’t just there so the crew can play a few rounds of Candy Crush while they wait for the docking sequence to finish.
According to reports from CNET, we are witnessing a massive, seismic shift in how NASA and its various partners view everyday technology. For the better part of five decades, the “space camera” was this mythical, heavily modified beast—a piece of hardware so ruggedized and specialized that it barely looked like the devices you or I use to snap photos of our brunch. But as of last week, those old walls have finally come down. NASA administrator Jared Isaacman recently confirmed that the crews on both Crew-12 and the upcoming Artemis II missions are now officially cleared to use modern smartphones to document their journeys.
Honestly? It’s about time. We’ve been living in an era where the computer sitting in your pocket has significantly more processing power than the entire guidance system used on the Apollo 11 lunar module. Yet, until this very month, astronauts were still largely tethered to “legacy” equipment. We’re talking about cameras that, while certainly professional-grade, were essentially relics from a pre-computational photography age. This move says just as much about the bulletproof reliability of our current gadgets as it does about NASA’s evolving philosophy on how to actually talk to the public.
Why the ‘Space-Qualified’ iPhone is finally replacing those heavy Nikon rigs
For the longest time, the rule was simple: if you were an astronaut and you wanted to take a photo, you reached for a Nikon. Specifically, the ISS has been dominated by Nikon D5 or D6 DSLRs since about 2016, usually paired with massive, heavy glass lenses. Don’t get me wrong, they are fantastic pieces of engineering, but they are also incredibly bulky. They require manual settings that can be a total nightmare to adjust while wearing a pressurized suit, and—perhaps most importantly in 2024—they aren’t connected to the rest of the world.
An Apple representative recently mentioned to CNET that this marks the first time the iPhone has been “fully qualified for extended use in orbit and beyond.” It’s worth pausing to think about what “qualified” actually means in NASA-speak. It isn’t just a fancy way of saying it won’t break if you drop it on the floor. It means the battery won’t swell up and explode in a vacuum, the screen won’t shatter under the crushing weight of extreme G-forces, and the internal circuitry is shielded enough that a stray cosmic ray won’t instantly turn the phone into a very expensive, glass-and-aluminum brick.
“Until now, astronauts were largely limited to legacy cameras and older imaging equipment… we are giving our crews the tools to capture special moments for their families and share inspiring images and video with the world.”
Jared Isaacman, NASA Administrator & SpaceX Commander
The shift is incredibly practical, too. If you look at a 2023 report from Statista, over 1.6 trillion photos are taken every single year, and a staggering 94% of those come from smartphones. The reality is that we are all “smartphone native” at this point. Why would you force a highly trained astronaut to fiddle with the ISO settings on a 2016 Nikon when the computational AI in a modern phone can adjust for the harsh, high-contrast lighting of space in a matter of milliseconds? As the old saying goes, the best camera is the one you have with you—even if “with you” happens to be 250 miles above the Earth’s surface.
Sharing the vibe: How the ‘Isaacman Doctrine’ is dragging space flight into the social media era
If you’ve been keeping an eye on Jared Isaacman’s career, this probably doesn’t come as a huge surprise. He’s the guy who commanded Inspiration4, the first all-civilian mission, and he clearly has a very different perspective on space than the old-school, Apollo-era brass. To the old guard, space was a sterile laboratory. To Isaacman and this new wave of SpaceX-era explorers, space is a destination—and a destination needs to be shared.
And let’s be totally honest here: sharing a photo from a high-end Nikon DSLR is a chore. It involves a laptop, an SD card reader, a painfully slow file transfer, and probably a very bored communications officer back on Earth. A smartphone? That’s just a few taps and a quick burst of Wi-Fi. By allowing these devices, NASA is effectively admitting that the “vibe” of a mission actually matters. They want the raw, vertical-video, “hey guys, look at this sunset” style of content that actually resonates with people on TikTok and X.
It’s also a brilliant move when it comes to securing public funding. A 2024 Pew Research study found that while about 70% of Americans believe it’s essential for the U.S. to be a leader in space, engagement tends to fall off a cliff when the missions feel “distant” or “too scientific.” By putting a familiar tool in the hands of astronauts, NASA makes the Moon feel like a place you could actually visit one day, rather than just a cold, dead rock in a grainy 1960s film strip.
The technical nightmare of making a smartphone vacuum-ready
Now, I know what you’re probably thinking. “I can’t even get my phone to stay on during a particularly cold day in Chicago, so how on earth is it surviving a literal spacewalk?” It’s a completely fair question. The thermal management alone is a total nightmare. In the vacuum of space, there’s no air to carry heat away from the processor. If you try to film a 4K video on an iPhone in a vacuum, the heat just builds up inside the chassis with nowhere to go until the whole thing shuts down to protect itself.
NASA hasn’t gone into the weeds about exactly what modifications were made, but you can bet there’s some serious heat-sinking going on under the hood. Then, of course, there’s the radiation. Once you’re outside the Earth’s magnetic field, high-energy particles are constantly zapping electronics. Most consumer chips would “bit-flip” (where a 1 magically turns into a 0) constantly. The fact that Apple and NASA have “qualified” these phones suggests they’ve found a way to either shield them physically or, more likely, use clever software to catch and fix those radiation-induced errors on the fly.
A 60-year lens: From the high-stakes film of Apollo to the instant clarity of OLED
It’s impossible to talk about the history of space photography without mentioning Hasselblad. During the Apollo missions, those square-format, silver-bodied cameras were the absolute gold standard of the industry. They were specially modified with thin-glass plates to prevent static electricity from ruining the film and featured large dials that could be turned even with bulky, pressurized gloves. They gave us the “Blue Marble” and the “Earthrise”—images that quite literally changed the course of human consciousness.
But those Hasselblads were also notoriously difficult to use. You had a very limited number of frames per film magazine. You couldn’t actually see what you’d shot until you got back to Earth and developed the film weeks later. There was always this massive, underlying risk that a tiny light leak or a development error could literally erase history before anyone ever saw it.
Compare that to the Artemis II mission scheduled for next month. When those four astronauts swing around the far side of the Moon, they won’t just be crossing their fingers and hoping they got the shot. They’ll be looking at a high-resolution OLED screen, seeing exactly what the 48-megapixel sensor is seeing in real-time. They can take a thousand photos, pick the absolute best one, and—theoretically—have it ready to beam back to Earth the second they regain a signal. It’s a level of creative freedom that Neil Armstrong couldn’t have even dreamed of in 1969.
Can astronauts use their own personal phones from home?
Not exactly. While they are indeed “modern smartphones” like the ones you’d buy at the store, these are government-issued devices. They have been through incredibly rigorous testing for things like outgassing (where materials release trapped gas in a vacuum) and battery safety. So, no, you won’t see an astronaut bringing their cracked iPhone 12 from home into the airlock just yet.
How do they actually get a signal in the middle of space?
They don’t use cellular towers, obviously—there aren’t exactly many 5G poles on the lunar surface. Instead, the phones connect to the ISS or the spacecraft’s internal Wi-Fi network. That network then transmits the data back to Earth via NASA’s Deep Space Network or, increasingly, the Starlink satellite constellation which provides a much faster link than we used to have.
Democratizing the ‘Overview Effect’—one lunar selfie at a time
There’s a famous psychological concept called the “Overview Effect.” It’s that profound, life-altering shift in perspective that astronauts describe when they see the Earth as a tiny, fragile, glowing marble hanging in the infinite void. For a long, long time, that feeling was reserved for a tiny, elite club—the “Right Stuff” brotherhood. It was something they told us about, but we couldn’t quite feel it with them.
By bringing the smartphone into the cockpit, NASA is finally bridging that gap. When an Artemis II astronaut takes a selfie with the lunar surface in the background next month, it won’t feel like a formal “NASA Photo” released by a government agency. It will feel like a photo your friend took on a really cool trip. And in that small, subtle shift of medium, the entire universe starts to feel just a little bit closer and more accessible to the rest of us.
We’ve certainly come a long way from the 2016 Nikons and the 1969 Hasselblads. We’re finally entering the true era of “connected” exploration. It’s a bit surreal to think that the same device you use to scroll through memes might soon capture the most important images of the decade, but honestly? It feels right. If we’re going to eventually become a multi-planetary species, we might as well take our favorite tools and our favorite ways of communicating with us.
And hey, if the Wi-Fi on the Orion capsule turns out to be as good as they say, maybe we’ll finally get a FaceTime call from the far side of the Moon. Now that would be a “special moment” worth sharing with the world. It’s a wild time to be looking at the stars.
This article is sourced from various news outlets. Analysis and presentation represent our editorial perspective.
