I was thinking, as I was watching Endeavor take off yesterday evening, with Barbara Morgan resuming Christa McAuliffe’s interrupted voyage into space, how helpful it would be whether Barbara Morgan had an iPhone onboard the Space Shuttle.

But, there’s actually a lot more to it than that.  As we of course already know from using iPhones and all kind of cell phones down here on Earth, the piece of equipment itself is only part of the picture.

You need an infrastructure for service.  Down here on Earth, it took better than a century to set up landlines worldwide, and in fact that job was never completed, and now no longer needs to be.  Cells, satellites, and the like do the job.

But we don’t yet have satellites that can reliably compose cell phones work from space to Earth, or vice versa.  So whether Barbara Morgan had an iPhone, the most she could do with it was look at, listen to, and work with what she already had in the iPhone when she blasted off.

Someday, that will change.  And when it does – when we get to the point of having dependable iPhone service not only on the Earth, amoung Earth and our folks out in space, we’ll know on that day that we have truly become a space faring civilization.

Original post by Chris