BACK TO THE FUTURE: The 10-Year-Old Nikon D5 DSLR Really Is the Best Camera for Artemis II.
While much of the discussion surrounding the Artemis II crew’s beautiful photos from their Orion spacecraft has focused on the images themselves, and they are fantastic shots, some of the discussion has surrounded the cameras used to capture the photos. Photographers love chatting gear, after all. While the Nikon D5 DSLR may seem like a puzzling choice as the primary camera on a prestigious space mission in 2026, it’s the best tool for the job.
Although the Artemis II crew successfully campaigned to get Nikon’s current flagship camera, the mirrorless Z9, aboard at the last minute, the crew is using the rigorously tested Nikon D5 DSLR from 2016 as the main camera. Not the Nikon D6, Nikon’s last professional DSLR that was discontinued in 2025, but the 10-year-old D5.
It’s easy to wonder why the Artemis II astronauts, who are part of an Artemis program costing many billions of dollars to operate, are using an old DSLR that, frankly, was not particularly beloved at the time of its release.
It’s all part of a theme with this mission. Unless I’m having a Mandela Effect moment, I seem to recall Ron Howard on the director’s commentary on the DVD of Apollo 13 talking about the irony of making a history movie about a Saturn V-powered moonshotecause of how dated the ’60s-era NASA technology had become by 1995. As Glenn wrote about Artemis a few weeks ago in the New York Post, that retro theme continues on this flight as well:
The Apollo program’s cutting-edge technology, in both the rocket boosters and the spacecraft themselves, advanced the state of the art in astronautics and established the United States as the leader in space exploration, bar none.
Artemis aims to be all these things, but mostly it’s recapturing Apollo’s “very risky” side.
Ironically, that’s not because it uses cutting-edge technology, but because it uses 50-year-old technology.
NASA wasn’t allowed to design the Artemis craft from scratch; Congress ordered it to use off-the-shelf technology developed for the space shuttle, including the shuttle’s main engines and fuel tanks.
Critics have dubbed the Artemis rocket — the SLS, or Space Launch System — the “Senate Launch System,” since it deliberately preserved existing jobs for existing contractors in important states.
As a jobs program, it’s been a success.
As a moon rocket, much less so.
The Artemis II mission is late because it’s had a series of serious technical problems, including life support system woes and a persistent hydrogen leak that echoed similar difficulties with the uncrewed Artemis I launch in 2022.
You’d think this would have been fixed in the intervening three years, but no.
The astronauts’ issues with Microsoft Outlook, and their numerous unplanned homages to Stanley Kubrick’s “Zero Gravity Toilet” moment in 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, all continue to provide a strangely dated technological feel to this mission.