This Phone Video From Artemis Is So Damn Cool

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 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.