The International Space Station: Did you Know?
From https://www.nasa.gov/

• 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.
• 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).
• 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.

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Comparing the Space Shuttle to the ISS

Characteristic	Space Shuttle	ISS
Length	122 feet	171 feet
Width	78 feet (wingspan)	240 feet (solar arrays)
Height	56 feet	90 feet
Volume	2,600 cubic feet	15,000 cubic feet
Weight	200,000 pounds	412,000 pounds
Computers	5-10 (including payload laptops)	52 (including payload laptops)
Flight Duration	11 days (average)