The ISS by the numbers

Altitude, speed, position and sunlight are the tracker’s own numbers. Orbital period is computed from that altitude with Kepler’s third law — it moves as the station’s orbit decays and is reboosted, rather than quoting a fixed 92 minutes.

CelesTrak SATCAT Boxscore— the US Space Force’s public catalog. Counts only what is large enough to track; the millions of fragments below roughly 10 cm are not in any catalog.

Zarya, the first module, launched on 20 November 1998. Expedition 1 — Bill Shepherd, Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev — arrived on 2 November 2000, and there has not been a day since without someone aboard. Everything above is arithmetic on those two dates.

The orbit count is explicitly approximate and rounded to the nearest thousand: the station’s altitude — and so its period — changes with every reboost, so a figure to the single orbit would be a false precision.

10people are off the planet right now, across every station in orbit — not the ISS alone. Launch Library’s crew record does not say which station each person is aboard, so this page does not claim to know.

Jessica Meir · Anna Kikina · Pyotr Dubrov · Jack Hathaway · Anil Menon · Andrei Fedyaev · Sophie Adenot · Zhu Yangzhu · Zhang Zhiyuan · Lai Ka-ying