The International Space Station circles Earth at a steady pace. How fast is it moving, in kilometres per hour?
Try it yourself first
🪐 Space · km/h
Enter an estimate in km/h.
Notepad
End a line with = to calculate it.
Show the answer and the method
Answer
About 28,000 km/h
At that pace the crew sees about 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets every 24 hours.
How to estimate it
The station flies about 400 km up, so its orbit has a radius of 6,400 + 400 = 6,800 km and a length of 2 × 3.14 × 6,800, about 42,700 km. It famously completes a lap in roughly 90 minutes, or 1.5 hours. Speed is 42,700 / 1.5, close to 28,500 km/h. The actual figure is about 28,000 km/h.
Source: NASA
More questions: Space
- Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 is the most distant object humans have ever built. In the mid 2020s, roughly how many kilometres from Earth is it?
- Proxima Centauri is the closest star to the Sun. How many kilometres separate us from it?
- A ray of light leaves the surface of the Sun. How many seconds later does it arrive on Earth?
- If you could put planet Earth on a bathroom scale, how many kilograms would it show?
- Venus spins extremely slowly. How many Earth days does it take Venus to rotate once on its axis?