Where is the ISS right now?

The International Space Station orbits about 420 kilometres above the Earth's surface, travelling at roughly 27,564 km/h, or 7.7 kilometres a second. It completes one orbit every 93 minutes, about 15.5 times a day.

This page is about where the ISS is. For the station itself, what it is for and what is aboard, see International Space Station.

The International Space Station on the live map, in Earth orbit. Drag to look around, or open the full map.

"Where is the ISS" is a different question from the one the other pages here answer, and the honest version of it is the orbit rather than a point. The station goes round once every 93 minutes, roughly an hour and a half, so any position is stale within seconds and it passes over most of the inhabited world several times a day. What holds still is the shape of the path: about 420 kilometres up, inclined 51.6 degrees to the equator, which is why it reaches as far as the latitudes of London and Patagonia and no further.

Altitude is not quite fixed either. There is enough atmosphere left at this height to drag the station down by tens of metres a day, so it is reboosted several times a year by the engines of a docked cargo ship and drifts between roughly 400 and 420 kilometres in between.

At 7.7 kilometres a second the crew see a sunrise or a sunset every forty-five minutes or so, around sixteen of each in a day.

Somebody has been aboard continuously since 2 November 2000. NASA plans to operate it to 2030 and has contracted SpaceX to build a vehicle to bring it down afterwards, over an empty stretch of the South Pacific.

Nearby on the map

Everything on the map