Credit: NASA
International Space Station Facts
- An international partnership of five space agencies from 15 countries operates the International Space Station. Learn more about visitors to the space station by country.
- The space station has been continuously occupied since November 2000.
- An international crew of seven people live and work while traveling at a speed of five miles per second, orbiting Earth about every 90 minutes. Sometimes more are aboard the station during a crew handover.
- In 24 hours, the space station makes 16 orbits of Earth, traveling through 16 sunrises and sunsets.
- Peggy Whitson set the U.S. record for spending the most total time living and working in space at 665 days on Sept. 2, 2017.
- The living and working space in the station is larger than a six-bedroom house (and has six sleeping quarters, two bathrooms, a gym, and a 360-degree view bay window).
- To mitigate the loss of muscle and bone mass in the human body in microgravity, the astronauts work out at least two hours a day.
- Astronauts and cosmonauts regularly conduct spacewalks for space station construction, maintenance and upgrades.
- The solar array wingspan (356 feet, 109 meters) is longer than the world’s largest passenger aircraft, the Airbus A380 (262 feet, 80 meters).
Credit: NASA
- The large modules and other pieces of the station were delivered on 42 assembly flights, 37 on the U.S. space shuttles and five on Russian Proton/Soyuz rockets.
- The space station is 356 feet (109 meters) end-to-end, one yard shy of the full length of an American football field including the end zones.
- Eight miles of wire connects the electrical power system aboard the space station.
- The 55-foot robotic Canadarm2 has seven different joints and two end-effectors, or hands, and is used to move entire modules, deploy science experiments and even transport spacewalking astronauts.
- Eight spaceships can be connected to the space station at once.
- A spacecraft can arrive at the space station as soon as four hours after launching from Earth.
- Four different cargo spacecraft deliver science, cargo and supplies: Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus, SpaceX’s Dragon, JAXA’s HTV, and the Russian Progress.
- Through Expedition 60, the microgravity laboratory has hosted nearly 3,000 research investigations from researchers in more than 108 countries.
- The station’s orbital path takes it over 90 percent of the Earth’s population, with astronauts taking millions of images of the planet below. Check them out at https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov.
Credit: NASA
