Get ready to take some out-of-this-world selfies. NASA astronauts will be allowed to take smartphones into space for the first time with the Crew-12 and Artemis II missions.
Crew-12 is scheduled to head to the International Space Station next week, but the long-awaited Artemis II mission, which will put humans around the moon for the first time since the 1960s, has been postponed to March.
“We are giving our crew members the tools to capture special family moments and share inspiring images and videos with the world,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman wrote in X.
With the latest iPhones and Android devices at hand, crews can collect images and videos a little more spontaneously. So for those of us back home, the upcoming space trip could be NASA’s best-documented journey to date.
Imagine how cool (or thrill-worthy) it would be if astronauts transformed into TikTok stars in zero gravity or took super-wide-angle selfies inside their spaceships? Apparently it’s equally interesting to those who work in government bureaucracies that NASA approved this rule change fairly quickly.
“Equally important, we challenged a long-standing process to qualify the latest hardware suitable for spaceflight on an expedited schedule,” Isaacman wrote. “That operational urgency will benefit NASA as it pursues highest-value science and research in orbit and on the lunar surface.”
It’s no surprise that it’s difficult to approve new technology into space. If one small thing goes wrong, a spaceflight can be a huge failure. According to Ars Technica, the latest cameras previously expected to be used for these missions were 10-year-old Nikon DSLRs and GoPros. It’s not esoteric, but there’s something more spontaneous and whimsical about using a smartphone.
tech crunch event
boston, massachusetts
|
June 23, 2026
However, this isn’t the first time a smartphone has gone into space. SpaceX has allowed smartphones on commercial astronaut missions.
