All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
Continuously inhabited since 2000, the ISS is mankind’s outpost in low-Earth orbit. From it, astronauts enjoy the spectacular sight of the Earth rolling below. As the video’s creator, Alex Rivest, puts it, “these lucky explorers and scientists clearly have the best view in the solar system.”
Opening on the ISS cupola, the largest window ever used in space, the video takes you on board the station, showing you what the astronauts see each day. The scenes fly over oceans, continents, lakes, and rivers, showing off beautiful cloudbanks and cities at night.
Rivest released the video on Apr. 12 to coincide with the anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s historic first flight into space. At the time, the U.S. and Soviet Union were locked in a bitter space race to prove their technological superiority over one another.
But the construction of the ISS shows how the two countries – along with the European, Japanese, and Canadian space agencies – managed to come together and build an orbiting platform. Their space programs are nowadays more intertwined than ever. With the retirement of the Space Shuttle fleet, U.S. astronauts must rely on Russian launch vehicles to reach the ISS.
The station is also at the center of the next phase of human spaceflight. At the end of the month, SpaceX is planning to launch its Dragon spacecraft, the first private capsule to dock with the ISS.
Video: Alex Rivest
Music: “Until Then” by London PM.
Other time-lapse clips and images courtesy of The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth, The Image Science & Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center. With special thanks to NASA astronaut Don Pettit, who took most of these sequences.
