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Check out some mind blowing facts about the International Space Station as seen in Channel 4's "Live from space" program. 1. It took an astounding 136 space flights on seven different types of launch vehicles to build the international space station. The first ISS module, was launched by a Proton rocket on 20th November 1998 and was called Zarya. 2. The ISS as it's referred to flies at around 4.791 miles per second, that's 17,248 miles per hour. It competes nearly 16 orbits a day and is fast enough to go to the Moon and back in under 24 hours. 3. The ISS is so big it could span the area of an American football field, the complex includes two bathrooms, a gymnasium and a 360-degree bay window. On completion it has more space than a six bedroom house. 4. The International Space Station is not only an orbiting laboratory, but also a space port for a variety of international spacecraft, there have been 89 Russian launches, 37 Space Shuttle launches, 3 flights by SpaceX's Dragon, 3 Japanese HTVs and 3 European ATVs. 5. The first expedition was in October 2000 and lasted for nearly 137 days. Since then over 200 people from 15 countries have visited the ISS and a 174 space walks have been completed, totalling almost 1,100 hours, or nearly 46 days. 6. According to NASA, there are 52 computers controlling the International Space Station. The US segment have 1.5 million lines of flight software code run on 44 computers communicating via 100 data networks and transferring 400,000 signals. 7. The International Space Station robotic arm was launched in April 2001 and is called Canadarm2. It is 57.7 feet long when fully extended and has seven motorized joints. This arm is capable of handling large payloads and helped build the entire orbiting complex. Attributes- "Tempting Secrets" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/