Daily Life and Weird Science on the ISS 🧑‍🚀🌍

Imagine waking up to a beautiful sunrise 16 times each day. For the astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS), that’s just an ordinary Tuesday. Traveling at 28,000 kilometers per hour (17,500 mph), about 400 kilometers above us, the ISS makes a full orbit around Earth every 90 minutes. It’s our first true “orbital home”—a cozy, six-bedroom space roughly the size of a football field, built piece by piece in the vast vacuum of space.

But what’s it really like to live and work there?

First, let’s clear up “zero gravity.” It’s actually a bit of a myth: there is gravity in orbit, just less than what we feel here on Earth. Since the ISS is moving so quickly around our planet, the astronauts are essentially in a continuous free fall around Earth, which creates what we call microgravity.

This environment makes everyday life feel incredibly strange. Without gravity pulling blood downward, astronauts often develop “puffy faces” and skinny legs. Their spines stretch out, and unless they exercise for hours daily, they lose bone and muscle mass.

Even simple tasks become tiny science experiments. Water floats in blobs, so every bit of moisture—from sweat to urine—is captured and recycled into clean drinking water. Imagine going to the bathroom when “things” tend to float around!

Flames burn as mysterious, spherical blue domes instead of flickering upward. And astronauts are experimenting with “space salads,” learning how to grow fresh vegetables in a gravity-free environment where plant roots don’t know which way is "down.”

But we don't just build orbital homes to learn how to survive in space; we do it to thrive on Earth.

The ISS is humanity’s most ambitious problem-solving lab, and some of the most exciting breakthroughs happen at the microscopic level.

Without gravity distorting their growth, protein crystals grow larger and more perfectly in space. This acts like a molecular microscope, helping medical researchers understand complex diseases and design better pharmaceuticals.

Similarly, living cells form natural 3D clusters in microgravity, instead of flattening out like they do on Earth, giving doctors more realistic models for testing cancer treatments and therapies.

This "weird science" is becoming so valuable that commercial companies like Varda Space Industries are building orbital factories specifically to produce pharmaceuticals and materials that simply can't be made on Earth.

By exploring how to master the space environment, we're opening up exciting new solutions that benefit everyone here on Earth. 

If you're curious about what daily spaceflight is like, the weird science of orbit, and the story of how we got there—without getting overwhelmed by technical details or equations, check out my new book, “Everything Is Flying – How Space Technology Shapes Life on Earth”

👉 Explore the full timeline of the history of space technology and get your copy at: everythingisflying.com

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