An international crew of seven people lives and works while
traveling at a speed of 8km per second, orbiting Earth about every 90 minutes.
In 24 hours, the space station makes 16 orbits of Earth, traveling through 16
sunrises and sunsets. So they have 16 GM’s and GN’s. (A big YAWNNNNN).

The acre of solar panels that power the station means
sometimes you can look up in the sky at dawn or dusk and see the spaceship
flying over your home, even if you live in a big city.

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 control the loss of muscle and bone mass in the human
body in microgravity, the astronauts work out at least two hours a day.

The Astronauts
regularly go for a spacewalk for space station construction, maintenance, and
upgrading of the ISS.

The solar array attached to ISS has a wingspan (356 feet,
109 meters) longer than the world’s largest passenger aircraft, the Airbus A380
(262 feet, 80 meters). Insane right?

You must wonder was this whole thing put there up all at
once? No the large modules and other pieces of the station were delivered on 42
separate flights, 37 on the U.S. space shuttles, and 5 on Russian Soyuz rockets
piece by piece.

This colossal space station is 356 feet (109 meters) from
one end to another, just one yard less than the full length of an American
football field including the end zones. Woahhh!

One more mind-boggling fact is, Wire that connects the
electrical power system aboard the space station is 12.87 km longggggggggg.

The 55-foot robot that has seven different joints called
Canadarm2 has seven other joints or hands and is used to move entire modules,
perform science experiments, and even transport astronauts for a spacewalk.

The ISS has eight docking stations or points so that Eight
spaceships can be connected to the space station at once.

Astronauts perform various scientific experiments up there like growing plant samples and anti gravity physics experiments.

Now how do astronauts get the food supplies and other
necessary items up there? Do they have some special space grocery store or a
mall up there?

Well to your surprise, Four different cargo spacecraft
deliver science cargo and supplies named Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus, SpaceX’s
Dragon, JAXA’s HTV, and the Russian are in Progress.

More than 20 different research payloads can be hosted
outside the station at once. The Water Recovery System recycles their excreated liquids
into drinkable healthy water. The number two excretion process can be understood from this GIF.

Who controls the ISS? Is there someone like Jarvis from
IRONMAN? the answer is almost yes, More than 50 computers control the systems
on the space station that are programmed to do so. More than 3 million lines of
software code on the ground helps ISS to function every second.

So even if you want to go and stay there you can smoothly
run your life there too but with a different purpose. An interesting fact is
your height gets increased by 1 or 1.5 cm in space because your spinal cord
gets more relaxed and is free from the gravitational pull. But when you
come back you are back to normal.

Drop  your thoughts below and let me know!