The ISS has been in orbit for:
Live Stream
Current ISS Crew
Spaceships Docked to ISS
USA
- Harmony Module IDA-2 ⇒ Boeing Starliner CFT
- Harmony Module IDA-3 ⇒ Crew Dragon Endeavour (Crew 8)
- Harmony Module Nadir Common Berthing Port ⇒
- Unity Module ⇒ Cygnus NS 20
Russia
- Rassvet Module ⇒
- Prichal ⇒ Soyuz MS-25
- Poisk Module ⇒
- Zvezda Service Module ⇒ Progress MS-26
News
While the International Space Station was traveling more than 262 miles over central Brazil, a SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft autonomously docked to station’s Harmony module at 5:07 a.m. EST, with NASA astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli and Loral O’Hara monitoring operations from the station.
The Dragon launched on SpaceX’s 29th contracted commercial resupply mission for NASA at 8:28 p.m. EST, Nov. 9, from Launch Complex 39A at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. After Dragon spends about one month attached to the space station, the spacecraft will return to Earth with cargo and research.
Live video from the International Space Station includes internal views when the crew is on-duty and Earth views at other times. The video is accompanied by audio of conversations between the crew and Mission Control. This video is only available when the space station is in contact with the ground. During “loss of signal” periods, viewers will see a blue screen. Since the station orbits the Earth once every 90 minutes, it experiences a sunrise or a sunset about every 45 minutes. When the station is in darkness, external camera video may appear black, but can sometimes provide spectacular views of lightning or city lights below.
Resources:
International Space Station Facts
- 243 individuals from 19 countries have visited the International Space Station
- The space station has been continuously occupied since November 2000
- An international crew of six people live and work while traveling at a speed of five miles per second, orbiting Earth about every 90 minutes.
- 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 acre of solar panels that power the station means sometimes you can look up in the sky at dawn or dusk and see the spaceship flying over your home, even if you live in a big city. Find sighting opportunities at http://spotthestation.nasa.gov
- 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 have conducted 232 spacewalks (and counting!) for space station construction, maintenance and upgrades since December 1998.
- The solar array wingspan (356 feet, 109 meters) is longer than the world’s largest passenger aircraft, the Airbus A380 (262 feet, 80 meters).
- 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
- More than 20 different research payloads can be hosted outside the station at once, including Earth sensing equipment, materials science payloads, particle physics experiments like the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer-02 and more.
- The space station travels an equivalent distance to the Moon and back in about a day.
- The Water Recovery System reduces crew dependence on water delivered by a cargo spacecraft by 65 percent – from about 1 gallon a day to a third of a gallon.
- On-orbit software monitors approximately 350,000 sensors, ensuring station and crew health and safety.
- The space station has an internal pressurized volume equal that of a Boeing 747.
- More than 50 computers control the systems on the space station.
- More than 3 million lines of software code on the ground support more than 1.5 million lines of flight software code.
- In the International Space Station’s U.S. segment alone, more than 1.5 million lines of flight software code run on 44 computers communicating via 100 data networks transferring 400,000 signals (e.g. pressure or temperature measurements, valve positions, etc.).
- Pressurized Module Length: 218 feet along the major axis (67 meters)
- Truss Length: 310 feet (94 meters)
- Solar Array Length: 239 feet across both longitudinally aligned arrays (73 meters)
- Mass: 925,335 pounds (419,725 kilograms)
- Habitable Volume: 13,696 cubic feet (388 cubic meters) not including visiting vehicles
- Pressurized Volume: 32,333 cubic feet (916 cubic meters)
- With BEAM expanded: 32,898 cubic feet (932 cubic meters)
- Power Generation: 8 solar arrays provide 75 to 90 kilowatts of power
- Lines of Computer Code: approximately 1.5 million
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