“We are giving our crews the tools to capture special moments for their families and share inspiring images and video with the world.” NASA administrator Jared Isaacman posted that on X this week, and with those few words the agency quietly rewrote a small piece of spaceflight culture.
For decades NASA treated pocket gadgets the way your dentist treats candy: necessary evils with caveats. Consumer phones raised concerns about flammability, outgassing, stray radio emissions and the unpredictable behavior of commercial electronics in radiation and vacuum. Now, starting with the ISS Crew‑12 rotation and the Artemis II lunar flyby, astronauts will be allowed to bring modern smartphones on board — phones meant for group texts, micro‑vlogs and, yes, selfies at 17,000 mph.
A practical change with outsized symbolism
This is not purely a decision about better photos. Isaacman framed it as part of a broader push to challenge requirement bloat and accelerate qualification of modern hardware. The approval process for flight‑rated equipment can be painfully detailed: radiation characterization of chips, battery UN 38.3 testing, MIL‑STD electromagnetic compatibility checks, thermal and vacuum runs, vibe testing and scrutiny for potential contaminants.
But after those checks were done for current handsets, NASA concluded that there was room to let these devices ride as personal, non‑mission‑critical gear. That means phones won’t be tapped into guidance, navigation or life‑support, but they will be permitted as tools for outreach, family contact and opportunistic documentation — the stuff that makes missions feel human to people at home.
How engineers tamed the pocket computer
Operationally, expect rules, not carte blanche. The devices will be treated like any other lithium‑ion battery device on station: charged on approved circuits, stowed during dynamic phases, and barred from any avionics interfaces. Use in cabin will be tightly managed (airplane mode more often than not), and data transfers will follow approved pathways — tethered connections or internal Wi‑Fi when available — to avoid unintended RF interference.
Why is that important? A lunar mission like Artemis II spends time outside Earth’s magnetic shield, where radiation levels and thermal swings are harsher than on the ISS. NASA’s safety teams have to be sure a consumer phone won’t outgas a chemical that fouls equipment, heat unexpectedly, or emit a frequency that confuses a radio. That work — adjusting long‑standing processes to modern hardware — is what Isaacman highlighted as operational urgency.
Not the first phone in space, but the first with staying power
Smartphones have been to space before. Two iPhone 4s famously rode on the final shuttle mission in 2011, and SpaceX and private missions have allowed pocket devices in cabin environments. NASA itself has a heritage of creative uses of consumer tech — consider the PhoneSat CubeSat experiments that ran off off‑the‑shelf Android phones.
Still, until now NASA crews relied largely on program‑issued DSLRs (the newest slated camera for Artemis had been a 2016 Nikon) and action cameras that are, by consumer standards, aging. Allowing modern phones brings far better computational photography, stabilization and low‑light performance into astronauts’ pockets.
What this will mean for public engagement
On the outreach side, this opens the door to more spontaneous, human‑scale content. Think short clips from the Orion cabin en route to lunar flyby milestones, behind‑the‑scenes training snippets, or an interior ultra‑wide shot that captures a crew of four mid‑flight joke. Those moments tend to resonate more than staged PR images; they’re the viral hooks that make space feel closer.
There are even operational advantages: quick video to document an experiment anomaly, or a handheld clip showing a transient phenomenon outside a window. And because consumer phones increasingly support satellite messaging and advanced on‑device processing, they can complement official comms — although NASA will continue to control what’s broadcast and downlinked.
If you’re curious about how phones are changing emergency and remote connectivity more broadly, there’s a related trend on the ground: T‑Mobile’s recent work to let compatible phones send 911 texts via satellite points to a future where handsets are more capable off the grid than ever T‑Mobile lets compatible phones text 911 via Starlink.
A small policy change, a larger pattern
This move fits into a wider trajectory of commercial tech seeping into space operations — from consumer compute to nascent concepts for orbital data centers. Companies are already pitching big infrastructure ideas for spaceborne compute and AI, which suggests a steady blurring between consumer and mission systems as long as safety is maintained. For a look at how big players are thinking about computing in orbit, see Google’s Project Suncatcher concept for space data centers Google’s Project Suncatcher aims to put AI data centers in space.
For the astronaut on Artemis II or the Crew‑12 visitor to the ISS, the practical upshot is simple: a familiar camera, always in their pocket, ready to record the parts of a mission that formal cameras and public affairs plans sometimes miss. Expect images that feel closer, faster and marginally more human than the carefully curated shots we’ve relied on in past decades.
And yes — it’s now officially permitted to imagine astronauts becoming short‑form social media creators. Whether that’s a genuine communications boon or a small cultural shift with a touch of cosmic cringe depends on how astronauts and NASA choose to use this new freedom.
(If you want to see the kinds of consumer phones likely to make that trip, check the latest listings for an iPhone.)