Facts and Figures of International Space Station

The ISS or the International Space Station is the largest international scientific project ever conceived.  The ISS was built by USA, Russia, Japan, Canada and 11 European countries.  The ISS is powered by solar panels which generate 110 Kilo watts of power once completed. 


The International Space Station marked its 10th anniversary of continuous human occupation on Nov. 2, 2010.  Since Expedition 1, which launched Oct. 31, 2000, and docked Nov. 2, the space station has been visited by 204 individuals.

At the time of the anniversary, the station’s odometer read more than 1.5 billion statute miles (the equivalent of eight round trips to the Sun), over the course of 57,361 orbits around the Earth.   Here are some of the important facts and figures about the International Space Station.

The ISS is not only an orbiting laboratory, but it is also a space port for many international spacecrafts.  As of June, 2013, there have been:

•  37 Space Shuttle launches to the ISS
• 89 Russian Launches
• 3 Japanese HTV's 
• 3 European ATVs
• 1 test flight and 2 operational flights by SpacX's Dragon

ATV is nothing but the Automated Transfer Vehicle is an expendable, pressurized unmanned resupply spacecraft developed by the European Space Agency (ESA).  ATVs are designed to supply the International Space Station (ISS) with propellant, water, air, payloads, and experiments. ATVs can also reboost the station into a higher orbit.
 
Totally 174 space walks have been  conducted in support of the ISS assembly totaling about 1,100 hours or nearly 45 days.  The Internatinal Space Station including its solar arrays, spans an area of a Foot Ball field and weights 924,739 pounds.  The livable room size of the space station at present is more than a six-bedroom house and it has two bath rooms, a gymnasium and a 360 degree bay window.   Additional launches will continue to update these facts and figures.

Facts about ISS

• Length of the Module :  167.3 feet ( 51 meters)
• The ISS measures 357 feet end-to-end. That’s equivalent to the length of a football field including the end zones
• Length of Solar array : 239.4 feet (73 meters)
• Habitable volume : 13,696 cubic feet ( 388 cubic meters)
• Total power generated : 84 Kilo watts ( 8 solar arrays)
• Pressurized Volume : 32,333 cubic fet ( 916 cubic meters)
• Lines of Computer Code: approximately 2.3 million
• Surface area of Solar arrays of ISS is equal to US Senate Chamber 3 times over
• ISS is larger than a 6-bed room house
• Solar array wing span is 240 feet which is more than Boeing 777 ( 212 feet)
• Till now more than 115 space flights were conducted on 5 different types of Launch vehicles over the course of ISS construction
• ISS is 4 times as large as Russian Space Station Mir and 5 times as large as US Skylab
• The weight of ISS is almost 1 million pounds ( 925,000 pounds).  This is equal to more than 320 auto mobiles.
• 3.3 million lines of software code on the ground support 1.8 million lines of flight software code.
• The electrical power system has 8 miles of wires connecting the system
• 1.5 million lines of flight software code runs on 44 computers in the ISS's US segment alone communicating via 100 data networks transferring 400,000 signals ( e.g. pressure, or temperature measurements etc.)
• Main U.S. control computers have 1.5 gigabytes of total main hard drive storage in the U.S. segment compared to modern PCs, which have ~500 gigabyte hard drives.
• The entire 55-foot robot arm assembly is capable of lifting 220,000 pounds, which is the weight of a space shuttle orbiter.
• The 75 to 90 kilowatts of power for the ISS is supplied by an acre of solar panels.
• Over the next 20 years, there will be 260 ISS spacewalks. There have only been 174 spacewalks in NASA history.