A day aboard the ISS

There is no sunrise alarm on the Station — or rather, there are sixteen of them. The Sun rises and sets every ninety-two minutes, so the crew follows a clock instead: Greenwich Mean Time, which keeps everyone — American, Russian, European, Japanese — on the same timetable.

The daily schedule

A typical crew day runs from about 06:00 to 21:30 GMT, and it is planned down to five-minute blocks by mission control teams on the ground. A rough shape:

• 06:00 – 06:50 — Wake up, personal hygiene, breakfast.
• 07:00 – 08:00 — Daily planning conference with Houston, Moscow, and partner control rooms.
• 08:00 – 12:00 — Science and maintenance.
• 12:00 – 13:00 — Lunch.
• 13:00 – 18:30 — More science, maintenance, or spacewalk preparation.
• 18:30 – 19:30 — Evening planning conference.
• 19:30 – 21:30 — Dinner, free time, personal calls home.
• 21:30 — Lights out.

Weekends are lighter but never truly off — housekeeping, cleaning filters, and routine maintenance still need to happen. The Station does not take a day off, so neither can the crew.

Exercise — two hours, every single day

Without gravity, muscles waste and bones thin at alarming speed. To fight that, every crew member exercises for roughly two hours a day on three pieces of equipment:

• A treadmill, where you strap yourself down with bungee cords.
• A cycle ergometer (stationary bike) bolted to the wall.
• The ARED (Advanced Resistive Exercise Device), which uses vacuum cylinders to simulate weightlifting up to about 270 kilograms.

Skip the routine and you come home unable to stand. Exercise is not optional; it is survival.

Eating in microgravity

Meals are mostly freeze-dried or thermostabilised pouches — add hot water, knead the bag, eat with a spoon. Tortillas replace bread (crumbs float into everything). Fresh fruit arrives on cargo ships and is eaten within days.

Crews report that their sense of taste dulls in orbit — fluid shifts toward the head and stuffs up the sinuses, much like a permanent cold. Hot sauce is one of the most requested condiments.

Science — the reason they are up there

A typical expedition runs over two hundred experiments. Fields include biology, materials science, fluid physics, Earth observation, and human physiology. The crew do not choose which experiments to run — that is scheduled from the ground — but they carry them out, photograph results, swap samples, and pack completed experiments for return.

Sleeping in a cupboard

Each crew member has a small booth — about the size of a phone box — with a sleeping bag tethered to the wall. You float inside it and zip up. There is a fan to keep air moving (in microgravity, exhaled carbon dioxide can pool around your face) and a laptop for an alarm.

What you can see from up there

Free time, when it exists, often goes to the Cupola — a seven-windowed observation dome that faces Earth. It is the Station’s most photographed spot and the source of most of the spectacular low-orbit imagery you see online. To watch that view in real time, jump to our live cameras — they look through those same windows.

If you want to understand more about the Station itself, start with what the ISS is or see who is living there right now.