Weirdly, this is actually something NASA has tested. It turns out that all the things consumers want from their phones—small and light body, durablity, fast CPU, good camera—are also things that are useful to have in a satellite flight control computer.
NASA’s PhoneSat program has launched several satellites that are essentially smartphones in an unpressurized box, to test whether smartphones could be used in building lower-cost control systems. Not only did the phones work great over the course of their mission[1] (about a week) but they were at the time the most powerful computers ever launched on a satellite.
A PhoneSat phone next to its shell which houses additional batteries and a maneuvering system as well as an external radio for communicating with the ground.
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