live view from international space station

It’s like a terrible share house, except you can’t leave, you have to work all the time and no-one gets a good night’s sleep. The ISS is smelly, noisy, messy, and awash in shed skin cells and crumbs. In movies, space stations are often sleek and clean. Skylab, for example, was so lacking in colour that astronauts broke the monotony by staring at the coloured cards used to calibrate their video cameras. This helps crew to orient themselves.Ĭolour is important in other ways, too. In the Russian modules, surfaces facing towards Earth (“down”) are coloured olive-green while walls and surfaces facing away from Earth (“up”) are beige. Spots of “gravity” occur throughout the space station, in the form of hand or footholds, straps, clips, and Velcro dots to secure people and objects. Everyday activities like drinking or washing require planning. If you let go of an object, it will float away. Actually living in space was another matter.Ĭontemporary space stations don’t spin to provide gravity. Yuri Gagarin’s voyage around Earth in 1961 proved humans could survive in space. Space invasions: what to do when stuff falls from the sky The fully assembled International Space Station.

Live view from international space station