Ten Surprising Facts
About The International Space Station

1. The Space Station is the largest manned object ever sent into space, encompassing 43,000 cubic feet of living and working space - the equivalent of two Boeing 747's.

2. Assembling the Space Station will require 45 launches - 36 from the United States and nine from Russia - and 1,705 hours of space walks, which is double the number of hours U.S. astronauts have walked in space since the beginning of the space program.

3. When fully constructed, the Space Station will be visible to more than 90 percent of the world's population.

4. Humans need a little less sleep in space because our bodies do very little work in a microgravity environment. It takes no effort at all to raise an arm, hold your head up, or move a bulky object.

5. The Space Station consists of 70 separate major components and hundreds of minor ones, all of which will be assembled for the first time in space.

6. Astronauts aboard the Space Station will spend more time working on experiments than anything else. Many projects require teamwork, so astronauts frequently work in pairs.

7. The Space Station circles the Earth every 90 minutes, and looks down on 85 percent of the populated areas.

8. The human body tends to lose muscle and bone mass rapidly in space. To fight this loss, at least two hours of strenuous exercise is built into every astronaut's daily schedule on the Space Station.

9. The construction of the Space Station is a collaboration of 100,000 people, hundreds of companies, and sixteen nations spread over four continents, among them the United States, Russia, Canada, Japan, Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

10. The Space Station is the most expensive single object ever built. The United States' participation has been estimated at $96 billion - a figure that nearly equals the combined cost of all of the Apollo missions to the moon.