Tukuk-OSISS Live Tracking
Position, speed and crew · live map, auto-refreshed every 15 seconds
The International Space Station has been continuously crewed since 2 November 2000, orbiting at about 400 km altitude and travelling at 27,548 km/h — fast enough to circle the Earth every ~92 minutes, roughly 15.5 orbits a day. The map below is real NASA Blue Marble satellite imagery of the whole planet: the glowing dot is the station’s live position (first read Thu, 29 Oct 2026 11:34:00 GMT), the white curve is an idealised ground track for its 51.6° inclination, and the dimmed half is Earth’s night side computed from the live subsolar point. The page updates itself — leave it open and the marker keeps moving across the sky.
Sub-station point
Altitude
Ground speed
Sunlight
Humans in space
Orbits per day
Who is up there right now
ISS · 9 aboard
Oleg Kononenko · Nikolai Chub · Tracy Caldwell Dyson · Matthew Dominick · Michael Barratt · Jeanette Epps · Alexander Grebenkin · Butch Wilmore · Sunita Williams
Tiangong · 3 aboard
Li Guangsu · Li Cong · Ye Guangfu
How to see it with your own eyes
The ISS is the sixth-brightest object in the night sky and needs no telescope. Best chances: within a couple of hours after dusk or before dawn, when you are in darkness but the station is still sunlit. Look for a steady, fast, non-blinking point crossing the whole sky in 3–6 minutes. Free pass alerts for your town are published by NASA’s "Spot the Station" service.
Why it matters
Microgravity research aboard the ISS covers protein crystallography, combustion, fluid physics, biology and human physiology — the evidence base for every future Moon and Mars mission. It is a jointly operated laboratory by five space agencies.