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I Regret to Inform You That the Artemis II Astronauts Are Having Lots of Screen Time

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Before they were loaded into the Orion spacecraft and boosted toward Earth’s moon by a NASA Space Launch System rocket, Artemis II mission crew members had their Orion Crew Survival System suits equipped with iPhones. In the photo above, Commander Reed Wiseman is stuffing his iPhone 17 Pro Max in his shin pocket.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman sees it as a victory, and I’m not necessarily arguing otherwise. The estimated cost of the Artemis program is approximately $90 billion. The famous NASA “space pen” story, whether accurate or not, has created a shared understanding of NASA as a place where everything costs a lot of money. Isaacman says adapting a piece of technology that costs no more than $2,000 “challenged long-standing processes and qualifying modern hardware for space flight on an accelerated timeline.”

According to the New York Times, in 2011, the last space shuttle mission included an experiment that required iPhone 4s, and passengers on private space flights 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 more.

Artemis 2 iPhone
© NASA

see for yourself. NASA does great daily footage compilations that show what the crew is doing up there, and you can’t forget the use of an iPhone in Saturday’s video (from which I pulled the images in this article). This is because the crew is familiar with iPhones from using them day in and day out on Earth. Taking pictures with an iPhone sounds easy and fun when you’re visiting the moon.

But computational smartphone photography is controversial because, in its eagerness to deliver eye-pleasing photos, it can produce mind-boggling distortions of reality that invariably create something more akin to a photo illustration than a photograph. Critics accuse some onboard AI systems of inventing details that were not in evidence on the original subject – and ridiculously, this sometimes includes the moon. Hopefully the official NASA iPhone Pro Max camera software has been changed to ensure documentary fidelity.

(Gizmodo contacted NASA for comment, and we’ll update this article if they respond.)

However, as many noticed early in the mission, the astronauts are also using much less popular consumer technology than the iPhone.

On the first day of the lunar flyby mission, Wiseman called Houston to troubleshoot a problem with his personal computing device, or “PCD,” called Optimus – actually a Microsoft Surface Pro tablet. “I also noticed that I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither of them are working. If you wanted to check Optimus and those two Outlooks remotely, that would be awesome,” Wiseman said.

A BlueSky post about it went viral, and it’s no mystery why. Everyone who has ever worked an office job can relate to the problems with Outlook, a notorious piece of quotidian software. Luckily it seems solving an IT problem when you’re a lunar astronaut doesn’t involve pinning and circling back, because the Outlook glitch was resolved almost instantly.

Artemis 2 Surface Tablet
© NASA

NASA says Surface tablets are “used for PFCs [or private family conferences]PMC [private medical conferences]Office Apps, DSLR Imagery Storage, [and] Viewing images/videos recorded on camera controllers.”

But a quick scan of the footage published by NASA on Saturday shows that the astronauts are busy tapping their bullets as best they can.

Artemis 2 Tablets
© NASA

They’re holding them like clipboards, and they definitely don’t look like they’re playing Slay the Spire on them.

Artemis 2 tablets again
© NASA

I guess this is a progress of sorts, as it allows for a less cluttered aesthetic than images from space missions – at least when some of the tubes and wires are removed from view. A 2006 PDF from NASA shows what comparable tasks looked like for NASA and Russia’s Roscosmos, and it apparently involved a ton of 8 1/2 x 11 sheets of paper. A photo of cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko using the communications system on the International Space Station (ISS) looks particularly tense and maximalist.

nasa 2006
© NASA

These aren’t children, and I’m not concerned about the mental development of the astronauts. In fact, astronauts are renowned for their mental stability (usually at least) and ability to withstand extremes. Even if the astronauts, in a worst-case scenario, hacked their tablets and phones so they could enjoy algorithmic sledding while they were in space, I’m pretty confident the mission would still go smoothly.

But if we are indeed moving into an era of frequent lunar missions, and perhaps interplanetary missions involving multiyear space flights, then it is a little disappointing to see astronauts on such familiar glowing rectangles. Flying in space is the ideal pinnacle of the human experience. In a sane reality, astronauts never do anything up there – not even boring stuff – that wouldn’t sound anything like me in an airport terminal.





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