59 Fun Facts About International Space Station

Run by five space agencies across many time zones, the ISS sets its clocks to which time?

Greenwich Mean Time gives the crew one fixed clock in a place where the Sun is useless for telling time, rising and setting on them many times a day, so even their New Year starts at midnight GMT.

The first crew to live on the ISS arrived in November 2000 and asked to use which radio call sign for it?

Alpha was commander Bill Shepherd's pick, requested on the crew's first day aboard, and the ground agreed to it as a call sign. Their arrival began a human presence on the station that ran unbroken for over 25 years.

Roughly how high above Earth does the ISS orbit?

400 km (250 miles) is low enough that faint traces of atmosphere still drag on the station, so it is always slowly sinking and needs regular rocket firings to climb back up.

How long does the ISS take to complete one orbit of Earth?

About 93 minutes is all a lap takes at some 28,000 km/h, so the crew flies into a new sunrise or sunset roughly every 45 minutes.

Including its solar arrays, the ISS is about as large as what?

A football field is NASA's own yardstick: end to end the station spans 109 metres, a yard short of an American field with its end zones, though the crew's living space inside is closer to a large house.

NASA's planned space station of the 1980s, later merged with Russia's plans to form the ISS, was named what?

Freedom's soaring costs forced repeated redesigns, so none of it ever flew before NASA merged the project with Russia's station plans in 1993.

The first ISS module, Zarya, was launched on 20 November 1998 aboard which rocket?

A Proton launched Zarya, the Russian-built 'space tug' that supplied the young station's power, propulsion and guidance until the Zvezda service module arrived.

Which Space Shuttle carried the American Unity node up to join Zarya in December 1998?

Endeavour's crew caught the orbiting Zarya with the shuttle's robot arm and mated it to Unity, then spacewalkers wired the two modules together.

Expedition 1's commander, Bill Shepherd, had previously served in which elite military unit?

His Navy SEALs training paid off in 1986, when Shepherd helped with the underwater salvage of the wreckage of shuttle Challenger.

Which US restaurant chain delivered its signature dish to cosmonaut Yuri Usachov aboard the ISS in 2001?

Pizza Hut paid Russia's space agency for the stunt, having already put its logo on the rocket that launched a station module the year before.

The first laboratory module on the ISS was NASA's first permanent orbital lab since which station was vacated in 1974?

Skylab was meant to wait for a shuttle reboost, but high solar activity dragged it down early, and it fell over Australia in 1979.

Which country contributed the laboratory that is the largest single pressurised module on the ISS?

Japan's lab, Kibō, meaning 'hope', was carried up in pieces on three shuttle flights in 2008 and 2009.

Europe's Columbus laboratory on the ISS is operated from a control centre in which country?

Germany hosts the Columbus Control Centre near Munich, which relays commands so researchers across Europe can run their experiments from the ground.

Which ISS module gives astronauts a seven-window view of Earth?

The Cupola was conceived as a workstation, so crews use it to steer the station's robotic arm while watching dockings and spacewalks.

Which ISS storage module, delivered on Discovery's final flight in 2011, is named after an Italian Renaissance figure?

Leonardo was later moved robotically from Unity to Tranquility in 2015, freeing a berthing port for cargo ships as NASA readied the station for commercial crew.

Which company built the experimental expandable module BEAM, attached to the ISS in 2016?

Bigelow Aerospace built BEAM for a two-year test, but the expandable room held up so well that NASA kept it as a storeroom and later took ownership of it.

Russia's Nauka module docked in July 2021, replacing which module that was deorbited to make room?

Pirs had served as a spacewalk airlock and docking port since 2001, until a Progress cargo ship pulled it away to burn up over the Pacific.

How does Canadarm2, the station's main robotic arm, move itself around the outside of the ISS?

End over end like an inchworm, Canadarm2 anchors one end to a power-and-data fixture on the hull while the free end reaches for the next one.

Why did Russian civilian Yulia Peresild spend about 12 days aboard the ISS in October 2021?

To shoot a feature film, The Challenge; with no film crew in orbit, director Klim Shipenko also ran the camera, sound and lights.

Robonaut 2, the robot delivered to the ISS in 2011, later received what upgrade in 2014?

A pair of legs was meant to let R2 climb around inside the station, but the upgrade triggered power faults, so NASA brought the robot home for repairs in 2018.

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer on the station's truss studies cosmic rays for evidence of what?

Dark matter hunter AMS was never designed to be serviced in orbit, yet spacewalkers cut into its pipes in 2019 and 2020 to fit a new cooling system.

The station's toilets use what to move waste away from the body in the absence of gravity?

Air flow pulls the waste away; urine then goes to a recycling system that turns it back into drinking water, which the crew really does drink.

How does the Russian segment's main oxygen generator on the ISS make breathable air?

Electrolysing water in the Elektron unit gives oxygen and waste hydrogen; when it broke down in early 2005, controllers tapped a cargo ship's oxygen stores.

After comedian Stephen Colbert won NASA's 2009 online vote to name a station module, what did NASA name after him?

A treadmill: NASA called the module Tranquility but named its new exercise machine COLBERT, the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill.

Sleeping quarters on the ISS are best described as what?

Person-sized soundproof booths each need a fan: in weightlessness exhaled carbon dioxide doesn't drift away, so it would pool around a sleeper's head.

Seen from the ground at its brightest, the sunlit ISS shines about as bright as which planet?

Venus is its rival, but the ISS is seen only within a few hours of dawn or dusk, when the ground is dark while the station overhead still catches sunlight.

The ISS's 51.6-degree inclination was chosen so that Russian launches from Baikonur would avoid what?

Overflying China on a due-east launch would have dropped spent booster stages there, so Russia flies a steeper path, which also carries the station over most of the inhabited Earth.

As of 2025, which crewed vehicle had made the most flights to the ISS?

Soyuz was the only way for anyone to reach the station between the shuttle's retirement in 2011 and the first crewed Dragon flight in 2020.

Who paid a reported $20 million in 2001 to become the first self-funded visitor to the ISS?

Dennis Tito had once been a NASA engineer, yet NASA objected to his trip on safety grounds; he flew anyway on a seat bought from Russia and spent nearly eight days in orbit.

Cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko set the record for most total time in space in 2024, at about how long?

About three years: a fifth mission lasting 374 days, twice the usual stay, carried Kononenko past Gennady Padalka's 878 days to a total of 1,111.

As of 2025, which American had spent the most total time in space and was the first woman to command the ISS?

Peggy Whitson retired from NASA in 2018 yet kept adding to her record, returning to the station as commander of private Axiom missions in 2023 and 2025.

Why was Frank Rubio's six-month ISS stay stretched to a US-record 371 days in 2023?

His spacecraft leaked coolant in December 2022 and was judged unsafe to ride home, so Russia sent up an empty replacement and Rubio's crew stayed on to fly it back.

Christina Koch's record 328-day mission in 2019-20 included which milestone?

The first all-female spacewalk had been planned for that March but was called off because only one medium-size spacesuit was ready; Koch made it with Jessica Meir in October 2019.

Which astronaut spent nearly a year on the ISS in 2015–16 while his identical twin was studied back on Earth?

Scott Kelly's twin Mark, a retired astronaut himself, served as the ground comparison; most of the changes seen in Scott's gene activity reversed after he landed.

Which David Bowie song did commander Chris Hadfield perform in a 2013 video aboard the ISS?

Space Oddity wasn't Bowie's to give: his publisher licensed it for a single year, so the first music video made in space vanished from YouTube in 2014 until a new deal restored it.

In 2007 Sunita Williams ran the first marathon in orbit as an official entrant in which race?

Boston Marathon organisers e-mailed the Massachusetts-raised astronaut her official bib, and she ran held down by a harness and bungee cords so she wouldn't float away.

Williams and Wilmore's eight-day 2024 Starliner test flight stretched to more than how long?

Nine months passed because thruster failures and helium leaks led NASA to send Starliner home empty; the pair rode down on another crew's capsule in March 2025.

Which crop from the station's Veggie chamber became the first that NASA cleared its ISS astronauts to eat, in 2015?

Lettuce was cleared for eating in 2015, when the crew ate half their red romaine harvest from the Veggie chamber and sent the rest home for testing.

Which hardy species, nicknamed 'Conan the Bacterium', was found in 2020 to have survived three years outside the ISS?

Deinococcus radiodurans survived in dried clumps: the outer cells died but shielded those beneath from ultraviolet light, a hint that microbes might ride between planets.

Which company won NASA's 2024 contract to build the vehicle meant to deorbit the ISS?

SpaceX will adapt its Dragon capsule to carry six times the usual propellant, because chunks of the station as big as a car should survive re-entry and must be steered away from people.

Point Nemo, NASA's 2022 choice of ISS crash site, is what?

The point farthest from land is the safest place to drop debris, which is why Mir and many old satellites were ditched there; the plan has the ISS follow after 2030.

By early 2026, roughly how many people from 26 countries had visited the ISS?

About 300 is small for a quarter-century because the station holds only about seven people at a time and most crews stay around six months.

Expedition 1 crew member Sergei Krikalev had earlier been left aboard Mir for 311 days while what happened back home?

The Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991 with Krikalev still in orbit; his stay ran to twice its planned length, and his hometown Leningrad had become St Petersburg by the time he landed.

In 2025, which was the only operational crewed space station other than the ISS?

Tiangong, China's 'Heavenly Palace', exists partly because a 2011 US law stops NASA working with China, so no Chinese astronaut has ever visited the ISS.

The station's Harmony node, launched in 2007, connects which three laboratories?

US, European and Japanese labs all plug into Harmony, which doubles as the station's front door: visiting crew capsules dock at its forward and top ports.

Which food became the ISS crew's stand-in for sliced bread?

Tortillas replaced sliced bread because they shed no crumbs to drift into equipment, and crews now wrap almost any meal in them.

The Russian-built Zarya module is owned by which country?

The United States paid a Moscow factory to build Zarya, so the station's very first module counts as American hardware even though Russia built and launched it.

Zvezda, core of the ISS's Russian segment, was once earmarked as the heart of which never-launched station?

Mir-2 was merged into the ISS instead, so its core module, first built as a backup for Mir's, finally flew in July 2000 as part of the new station.

The Quest airlock, launched aboard Atlantis in July 2001, was built by which company?

Boeing built Quest so both suit types could be used: before it, American suits could leave only from a docked shuttle and Russian ones only from Zvezda.

The Harmony, Tranquility and Columbus modules were all built in which Italian city, the home of Fiat?

Turin's space plant built the two nodes as barter: Europe handed them to NASA instead of cash, as payment for launching its own laboratory on the shuttle.

In 2013 a spacewalk by Italy's Luca Parmitano was cut short when his helmet began filling with what?

Water from the suit's cooling system crept over his eyes and nose after sunset, so he felt his way back to the airlock by following his safety cable.

In November 2013, two cosmonauts carried what outside the ISS on a spacewalk ahead of the Sochi Winter Games?

The Olympic torch spent four days in space, and once it was home the same torch was used to light the cauldron at the Sochi opening ceremony.

In 2007 astronaut Scott Parazynski, a trained physician, rode a robot arm out to 'suture' a tear in what?

A solar array ripped while unfurling, so the crew made straps they called cufflinks and Parazynski stitched the panel from the end of a long boom.

In 2015 astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti brewed the first cup of what in space, using a machine built for the ISS?

Espresso came from a machine named ISSpresso, built with Italian coffee firm Lavazza; until then crews drank freeze-dried instant coffee from pouches.

Since 1997, a law in which US state has let NASA astronauts cast their election ballots from orbit?

Texas is home to NASA's astronaut corps in Houston, and the year the law passed David Wolf became the first American to vote from space, aboard Mir.

Russia's ball-shaped Prichal module was added to the ISS in 2021 to provide extra what?

Docking ports are what Prichal, Russian for 'pier', was built to add: NASA counts five free ones, because the sixth is the one that holds the module onto the station.

Which two-armed Canadian robot rides on the end of Canadarm2 to do fiddly repair jobs outside the ISS?

Dextre swaps batteries and cameras that once needed an astronaut outside, so crews make fewer risky spacewalks and spend the time on science instead.

In weightlessness, as in combustion experiments on the ISS, a small flame takes what shape instead of the familiar teardrop?

A sphere forms because hot gas does not rise without gravity, so nothing draws the flame upward and fresh oxygen can only drift in slowly.

The air that crews breathe inside the ISS is kept closest to which of these?

Sea-level air on Earth is what the station copies, so astronauts heading out in low-pressure spacesuits must first breathe pure oxygen for hours, like divers avoiding the bends.