Every 90 minutes, the ISS laps the whole planet.
Every 90 minutes, the ISS laps the whole planet. Not once a day — sixteen times. At roughly 28,000 kilometres per hour, the station crosses entire continents in the time it takes to boil a kettle. It sits about 400 kilometres up, moving so fast that gravity never quite catches it — it's perpetually falling forwards around the curve of the Earth. For the crew, the clock barely means anything the way it does for us. Sunrise arrives every 45 minutes. Sixteen dawns. Sixteen dusks. All in one calendar day. And someone has been living up there, riding that loop, every single day since November 2000 — over two decades without a gap in human presence above our world. Follow Deep Field Vault for more of the universe, one fact at a time.