Hi, I'm Jacob Keaton this is #AskNASA.
I'm here to answer your questions about the
International Space Station.
[Music]
What is the International Space Station?
This is the International Space Station.
This is an orbiting outpost that is humanities
first permanent home away from home.
It was built over the course of a decade by
fifteen different countries and five space
agencies.
Onboard the crew lives in these cylindrical sections
together they are about the size of a five-bedroom
house that houses six people.
This right here is the Canadaarm which is a
robotic arm that lives outside its about fifty
feet long, maybe a little more.
And it's capable of moving all of these pieces of
space station around like a construction site.
This is the Japanese laboratory complex, right here.
We've got a little astronaut right there for scale.
Each one of these boxes is an external experiment
that is exposed to the vacuum of space.
Over here we have the European lab.
None of these components ever met on the ground.
The first time they ever touched each other was in
space and they all worked perfectly because our
engineers and teams have worked together so closely
before we launched them.
Moving back here is the United States lab, thats
where everything meets and joins up.
This is the airlock right here, thats where
astronauts do spacewalks from.
They put on their spacesuits and they can go outside.
These are the solar arrays, there are eight of
them and this is what powers the space station.
Its an entirely solar powered vehicle.
And thats the International Space
Station, our orbiting home in space.
Can I see the space station from Earth?
Yes you can.
The space station's actually the third
brightest object in the sky after the Sun and Moon.
It orbits the Earth once every ninety minutes, but
it needs the Suns light to shine on these arrays so
that we can see it.
If you have a pair of binoculars you can
actually make out pieces of the space station from
the ground, but you dont need a telescope.
A telescope zooms in too much and it moves far too fast.
NASA has a website called SpotTheStation which tells
you when to go look.
You can walk outside and it looks just like an
airplane moving through the sky except it doesn't
flash and its very, very bright.
The space station weighs about nine hundred
thousand pounds and took more that forty rocket
launches to get it into space.
The space station runs on Greenwich Mean Time
because the space station partnership spreads around
the entire world so we had to pick one time zone that
everybody could reference off of.
The space station does have Wi-Fi.
A lot of the external payloads communicate with
the inside of the space station via Wi-Fi.
The space stations about the size of a football
field including the endzones from end-to-end
and from front-to-back is about the size of a
football field to the sidelines.
How fast does the space station move?
Space station travels about seventeen thousand
five hundred miles an hour, which is whats
called orbital velocity for low Earth orbit.
This means it circles the Earth once every ninety
minutes.
That means the crew gets to see sixteen sunrises
and sixteen sunsets every day.
What do the astronauts on space station work on?
The crew on the space station is there to do
research into all kinds of scientific disciplines
from Earth science to space science to
microgravity research to biology to just what it's
like to live and work in space.
When the crew isn't maintaining the space
station, they are exploring the effects of
microgravity on their own bodies as well as on the
systems we will need to go further into the universe.
[Music]
NASA's working with its partners in commercial
industry to transfer the lessons of the space
station on to them so they can learn operate in low
Earth orbit potentially building more platforms
there to conduct all sorts of new and exciting
research.
NASA will be moving on to build an outpost around
the Moon called the Gateway which is going to
enable lunar exploration.
[Music]
How will the space station help us go farther into space?
The space station, as our first permanent home in
space has taught us what we really need to live and
work and be productive in the space environment.
The space station is about three hours from home if
we ever need to get home.
As we go to the Moon under the Artemis program the
crews will be about three days from home.
After we learn how to work and live on the Moon we
are going to go on to Mars.
Mars can be anywhere from six to nine months from home.
The space station will continue to be our base
camp in low Earth orbit as we continue under the
Artemis program to the Moon and on to Mars.
Coolest thing about the space station in my mind
is the fact that fifteen countries worked together
to build this and more than a hundred other
countries have been invited onboard to conduct
all sorts of experiments.
Its truly a global enterprise and it shows
how when we put our minds to it we can really
achieve something amazing.
[Music]
Do you have a question for NASA?
Send your questions to our experts on Twitter using
#AskNASA.