Loading module…

What you will learn in Human Spaceflight and the ISS

1. What orbiting actually means
Gravity at the station's altitude is 88% of what it is in your kitchen. The floating is free fall, and the widget puts that number beside the astronaut so the zero-gravity explanation has nowhere left to stand.
2. The station
A 463-tonne building in an orbit that hugs the globe, on an element set taken from NASA's own ephemeris rather than from a tracking site — and a ground track that shifts 23.6° west each time round, not the 22.5 you will find quoted.
3. Living in orbit
Fifteen and a half sunrises a day, a night that lasts about three quarters of an hour, and a crewed-since date rendered as a live duration. What free fall does to a routine — and what this widget can and cannot tell you about it.
4. Seeing it from your garden
Two things have to be true at the same moment, and at most sites in most weeks they are not. Zero visible passes in three days is the ordinary answer, and the widget explains it rather than looking broken.
5. After the ISS
Three rows, each carrying the date its plan was announced — and several things the widget declines to render at all. A target is a claim about somebody's intention rather than about the future, and the rendering has to make that legible.

Loading module…

1. What orbiting actually means
Gravity at the station's altitude is 88% of what it is in your kitchen. The floating is free fall, and the widget puts that number beside the astronaut so the zero-gravity explanation has nowhere left to stand.
2. The station
A 463-tonne building in an orbit that hugs the globe, on an element set taken from NASA's own ephemeris rather than from a tracking site — and a ground track that shifts 23.6° west each time round, not the 22.5 you will find quoted.
3. Living in orbit
Fifteen and a half sunrises a day, a night that lasts about three quarters of an hour, and a crewed-since date rendered as a live duration. What free fall does to a routine — and what this widget can and cannot tell you about it.
4. Seeing it from your garden
Two things have to be true at the same moment, and at most sites in most weeks they are not. Zero visible passes in three days is the ordinary answer, and the widget explains it rather than looking broken.
5. After the ISS
Three rows, each carrying the date its plan was announced — and several things the widget declines to render at all. A target is a claim about somebody's intention rather than about the future, and the rendering has to make that legible.