NASA Celebrates 15 Years of the ISS With a Song

Today, the International Space Station turns 15 years old. And to mark this occasion, NASA have released a lighthearted and rather educational song and video.

The song itself is delightfully upbeat and played in a country-style, perhaps inspired by NASA’s home in Houston, Texas, full of twangy banjos and low, rhyming vocals that fail to lapse throughout. Accompanying the song is a charming, family-friendly animated video, helping to visualize the details of the lyrics and come complete with a little banjo-playing astronaut.

It is also a great way to learn more about the ISS, for both adults and children too, being packed full of interesting facts and trivia about the space station, from simple facts such as the station taking around an hour and a half to orbit the Earth at an altitude of over 200 miles all the while weighing around 1 million pounds and, more important facts, such as that it only has two toilets and no bath! Yet despite this, over 200 astronauts have lived on board since 2000.

This wouldn’t be the first musical number to be associated with the ISS either, with astronaut Chris Hadfield releasing a video of him covering David Bowie’s Space Oddity, recorded on the ISS itself, back in 2013.

Now the real question is whether the ISS will manage reach 30, as its operational time currently gives it until 2024, and NASA having stated it could even last to 2028.