In the 10 days since Artemis II splashed down safely, NASA has continued to release new imagery from the mission. A personal favorite is the one atop this post, taken from a camera mounted on one of the Orion capsule’s solar array wings. It captures Orion, the Moon, and the Earth, helping to add some framing to a perspective that humans were never meant to quite wrap their brains around.
The photographs from from Artemis have been magnificent. They are meant to be. Part of this test flight’s mission was to sell itself: NASA’s budget is never secure from year to year, and the administration is responsible for stirring up its own public support. What better way to do that among a visually oriented species like ours than with pictures? They may not all have strictly scientific value, but they carry real worth nonetheless.
The vast majority of those images have understandably been captured on top-of-the-line equipment. Shooting in space presents unique challenges, and the Artemis crew trained for 20 hours on photography alone, with professional instructors. But the astronauts were also issued iPhones. Why iPhones? They’re compact, easy to use, and offer perfectly decent photo and video quality for personal use. More personal-seeming photos were the whole idea—part of selling Artemis is selling the crew as regular people doing extraordinary things in extraordinary circumstances. Imagery that’s a little less polished and processed helps convey life inside Orion.
The pictures already released from the crew’s iPhones is stunning, predictably, and during the lunar flyby Commander Reid Wiseman showed his phone to the live cameras, revealing a nifty bit of lunar texture. But this past Sunday, Wiseman uploaded and posted a video taken on his iPhone, of the Earth setting over the Moon, filmed from a darkened Orion. I really think this video is worth your time:
This video makes it all feel more “real” to me than anything else released so far. There’s a sense of place here: we see the edges of the window, we see Wiseman’s phone struggling to focus through the glass (relatable!), we hear him and the other crew members talking—mostly saying things like “wow” and “dude.” For the first time I have a sense of how large the Moon looked outside their windows—what the actual people aboard were seeing. What you or I would have seen.
I find this moving, this proximity of the transcendent and the mundane. An accomplishment that feels so removed from anything I can comprehend suddenly becomes something not all that far afield from any time I tried to take a picture through an airplane window. The behavior of trying to get a phone camera to cooperate is so familiar. Only the view is different—though it is very different (holy shit they’re actually in space in a spaceship and they’re behind the Moon). Capturing the improbable with the commonplace contextualizes the former, giving it an unmistakably human frame of reference that has somehow been the hardest part of space exploration to convey. They’re just people up there.