The International Space Station is a crewed laboratory the size of a football field, orbiting in low Earth orbit at about 400 km. It is the largest structure humans have ever put in space and has been continuously occupied since November 2000 — a rotating international crew, typically around seven astronauts and cosmonauts, lives and works aboard at any given time.
At that altitude the station travels at roughly 28,000 km/h — about 7.7 km per second — and completes one full lap of the Earth every 90 minutes or so. That means the crew sees around 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets every day as they race in and out of Earth’s shadow.
Because it is big, low and highly reflective, the ISS is the brightest human-made object in the night sky and is easy to see without a telescope. It looks like a steady, fast-moving star — no blinking lights — that crosses from one horizon toward the other in a few minutes before fading as it enters Earth’s shadow.
Its orbit is inclined about 51.6 degrees to the equator, so its ground track covers most populated latitudes and the station passes over the great majority of people on Earth at some point. OrbitLive shows its live position and the next visible passes for where you’re standing.