The International Space Station (ISS) marked 25 years of continuous human habitation on Sunday, an impressive example of global cooperation and humanity’s enduring commitment to space exploration.
It’s the perfect moment to enjoy this wonderfully relaxing fly-through of the facility, which was recorded in 4K video and posted on YouTube nearly a decade ago.
Embedded at the top of this page, the footage tours a large chunk of the space station, starting off inside the famous Cupola, the seven-window module offering panoramic view of Earth and beyond. Keep your eyes peeled and you’ll also spot a Cygnus spacecraft and Soyuz crew capsule outside the Cupola, along with some of the station’s enormous solar arrays.
A neat touch is that the video occasionally displays a map of the sprawling orbital outpost, with a mark indicating the precise location of the camera as it makes its way through the facility.
The first module for the space station arrived in orbit in 1998, with others added over the following months and years. As you can tell from watching the footage, the ISS is enormous, with NASA comparing it to being larger than a six-bedroom house. The facility measures 357 feet (108 meters) from end-to-end, which is about the size of an American football field, and includes six sleeping quarters, three bathrooms, a gym, and a number of research facilities.
Up to now, the ISS has hosted around 290 people from more than 25 countries, with the visitors working on more than 3,000 research and educational investigations in low-Earth orbit.
The station is usually home to around six people at any one time, but the crew occasionally grows during changeovers and has been known to reach as many as 13 astronauts for short periods.
With the ISS getting on in years, maintenance costs are growing, and so those operating it have agreed to decommission the habitable satellite in about five years’ time, at which point it will mostly burn up as it enters Earth’s atmosphere.
But that won’t be the end of human habitation of space, as private firms are currently developing their own commercial stations for low-Earth orbit. Additionally, China now has its own space station orbiting Earth, and NASA is planning to send humans to the moon on long-duration missions in the coming years. And who knows — we could one day colonize Mars.
