Space station
Where is the International Space Station right now?
The International Space Station is about 400 km above the Earth, going once round it every 93 minutes at about 27,600 km/h, somewhere between 51.6° north and 51.6° south of the equator. Your browser works out the exact spot the moment this page opens, from orbital elements saved on 15 October 2026.
Opens the map on the station, following it as it moves.
Where it is now
- Latitude
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- Longitude
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- Over
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- Height
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- Speed
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- People aboard
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When you can see it from your place
Choose a city to see when the station next passes it. With scripts off, the map's Tonight view does the same from the place you set there.
A pass counts as visible here when the station is more than 10° above the horizon, in sunlight, while the Sun is more than 6° below it: the same rule the app uses for every satellite.
How to see the ISS
It looks like a very bright, steady white star that crosses the sky in two to six minutes, faster than a plane and with no blinking lights. At its best it outshines every star and rivals Venus. You need no telescope.
You can see it only while the sky where you stand is dark and the station, 400 km up, is still in sunlight: in the two hours after dusk or before dawn. In the middle of the night it is in the Earth's shadow, and at noon the sky is too bright. Passes repeat for a few days and then stop for a few, as its orbit and the Earth's turning drift apart.
Take the trip from your ground to the station · Where people are living in space
Measured or computed? The orbital elements are published by CelesTrak from tracking and saved by this site; the position shown is computed from them (a model called SGP4). The older the elements, the less the position can be trusted: a few days is minutes of travel for a station that moves 7.7 km every second. The page says how old they are.
Key facts
- Catalogue number (NORAD)
- 25544