Before they were loaded into the Orion Spacecraft and propelled toward Earth’s moon by a NASA Space Launch System rocket, the crew members of the Artemis II mission had their Orion Crew Survival System suits equipped with iPhones. In the photo above, commander Reid Wiseman is having his iPhone 17 Pro Max stuffed into his shin pocket.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman frames this as a win, and I’m not necessarily arguing otherwise. The estimated cost of the Artemis program is roughly $90 billion. The legendary NASA “space pen” fable, accurate or not, has created a shared understanding of NASA as a place where everything costs too much money. Isaacman says the adoption of a piece of tech that costs no more than $2,000 “challenged long-standing processes and qualified modern hardware for spaceflight on an expedited timeline.”
NASA astronauts will soon fly with the latest smartphones, beginning with Crew-12 and Artemis II. We are giving our crews the tools to capture special moments for their families and share inspiring images and video with the world. Just as important, we challenged long-standing…
— NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman (@NASAAdmin) February 5, 2026
According to the New York Times, all the way back in 2011, the final space shuttle mission involved an experiment that required an iPhone 4s, and passengers on private space flights have used smartphones. But these modified iPhones that reportedly can’t connect to the internet or bluetooth are nonetheless a different kind of milestone: they’re the first iPhones in space that look like they’re being used a little too much.
See for yourself. NASA makes terrific daily footage compilations that show 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 images in this article). It stands to reason that the crew is familiar with iPhones from using them day in and day out on Earth. Taking photos with an iPhone while you’re on the way to the moon sounds easy and fun.
But computational smartphone photography is controversial, since, in its eagerness to deliver eye-pleasing photos, it can present mind-bending distortions of reality that arguably create something more akin to a photo illustration than a photo. Critics accuse some onboard AI systems of inventing details that weren’t in evidence on the original subject—and hilariously enough this sometimes involves the moon. One hopes the camera software in the official NASA iPhone Pro Max has been tweaked to ensure documentary fidelity.
(Gizmodo reached out to NASA for comment about this, and we will update this article if they answer.)
As many people noticed early in the mission, however, astronauts are also using much less popular consumer tech up there than an iPhone.
On the first day of the lunar flyby mission, Wiseman called Houston to troubleshoot something called Optimus on his glitching personal computing device or “PCD”—actually a Microsoft Surface Pro tablet. “I also see that I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working. If you want to remote in and check Optimus and those two Outlooks, that would be awesome,” Wiseman said.
A Bluesky post about this went viral, and it’s no mystery why. Everyone who has ever had an office job can relate to having problems with Outlook, a notoriously dreary piece of quotidian software. Fortunately it looks like resolving an IT problem when you’re a lunar astronaut doesn’t involve putting a pin in that and circling back, because the Outlook glitch was resolved almost immediately.
NASA says the Surface tablet is “Used for PFCs [or private family conferences], PMCs [private medical conferences], office apps, DSLR imagery storage, [and] viewing recorded stills/videos on camera controllers.”
But a quick scan of the footage NASA published Saturday shows the astronauts are busy tapping away at their tablets seemingly as much as possible.
They’re holding them like clipboards, and they certainly don’t look like they’re playing Slay the Spire on them.
I suppose this is progress of a sort, since it allows for a less cluttered aesthetic than we’re accustomed to in images of space missions—at least when some of the tubes and wires recede from view. A 2006 pdf from NASA shows what comparable work tasks used to look like for NASA and Russia’s Roscosmos, and it evidently involved a ton of 8 1/2 x 11 sheets of paper. One photo of Cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko using the communication system on the International Space Station (ISS) looks particularly stressful and maximalist.
These aren’t babies, and I’m not worried about the astronauts’ mental development. In fact, astronauts are famous for their mental stability (usually at least) and their ability to withstand extremes. Even if the astronauts did, worst case scenario, hack their tablets and phones to let them binge on algorithmic slop while they’re in space, I’m fairly confident the mission would still go just fine.
But if we really are heading into an age of frequent lunar missions, and perhaps interplanetary missions involving multiyear spaceflights, seeing the astronauts on such familiar glowing rectangles is a little deflating. Flying around in space is the archetypal peak human experience. In a saner reality, nothing the astronauts ever do up there—not even the boring stuff—would look anything like me in an airport terminal.
