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NASA's Final Shuttle Mission To Take Up A Pair Of "Space-Ready" iPhone 4s

NASA's Final Shuttle Mission To Take Up A Pair Of "Space-Ready" iPhone 4s

June 10, 2011
For many, the NASA Space Shuttle program has represented the modernization of a publicly-consumable Space Age, and the last mission (Atlantis, STS-135) is sure to bring its storied history back to the forefront as we all say goodbye.  That said, I personally think the Shuttle program was a fantastic waste of money and vision, which makes it all the more ironic that its final flight will take a pair of iPhone 4s into orbit for use aboard the International Space Station. Devices so affordable and forward-thinking going up as such a wasteful, philosophical dead-end goes down couldn't be any more poetically appropriate.  Anyways, on the tech side of things, the two iPhones are going to run a custom-made app called SpaceLab for iOS that, according to Cult of Mac, 
will be used for space research... [and] will remain on the ISS for several months for the crew to conduct a series of experiments. ...Among other things, the app will help ISS astronauts find their relative position [in] space by matching pictures of the Earth taken with the iPhone’s camera to a database of coastline maps in the app.
While the notion that an iPhone app could possibly be necessary for any actual research or data-gathering aboard a $2 billion vehicle underscores my views of the Shuttle program in general, the information will at least be collected and eventually distributed to the currently-available "terrestrial" version of SpaceLab.   If you want try it out for yourself, SpaceLab for iOS is available for $0.99 on iTunes and runs simulated, zero-G experiments with features "identical to the version" to be flown in space.

Mentioned apps

$0.99
SpaceLab for iOS
SpaceLab for iOS
Odyssey Space Research, L.L.C.

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