the ISS
right now?
What is the
International Space Station?
A football-field-sized laboratory orbiting Earth at 27,600 km/h — built by 16 nations, permanently staffed since the year 2000.
The ISS is a joint project between NASA, Roscosmos, ESA, JAXA, and CSA — the largest international scientific collaboration in history. Construction began in 1998 and involved over 40 assembly flights.
It orbits at roughly 408 km altitude in low Earth orbit, completing one full trip around the planet every 92 minutes. The crew experiences 16 sunrises per day.
The station functions as a microgravity research platform. Without the pull of gravity, experiments in biology, physics, and materials science become possible that cannot be replicated anywhere on Earth's surface.
Over 270 people from 20 countries have lived aboard the ISS since it was first occupied in November 2000 — humanity's longest-running off-world outpost.
Why can't you see a fixed dot in the sky? Because the ISS never stops moving. In the time you've read this page, it has already crossed hundreds of kilometres. The coordinates above are a snapshot of a machine travelling at 23 times the speed of sound.
Orbital trail &
predicted path
Every time you press Track, the ISS position is logged. The gold dashed line shows its history — where it has been since you started tracking. After 40 points the oldest ones drop off the trail.
Using the ISS orbital inclination of 51.6° and speed of 7.66 km/s, the tracker calculates where the station will be over the next ~10 minutes and draws it ahead of the current position.
The panel shows whether the ISS is currently in sunlight or passing through Earth's shadow (orbital night). This is calculated from the Sun's position relative to Earth at the ISS's current coordinates.
The crew panel lists every person currently aboard the ISS, fetched live from the open-notify.org astronauts API each time you press Track.