The International Space Station is about as long as an American football field, roughly 356 feet (109 meters) from end to end and about 240 feet (73 meters) wide, including its solar arrays. Inside, it has about the living and working volume of a large fiveā€‘bedroom house, with roughly 388ā€“400 cubic meters of habitable space for astronauts.

Basic size in numbers

  • Length: about 356 feet / 109 meters.
  • Width (solar arrays included): about 240 feet / 73 meters.
  • Mass: about 420,000ā€“420,000+ kilograms (around 925,000 pounds).*
  • Pressurized volume (all sealed modules): about 1,000ā€“1,200 cubic meters.
  • Habitable volume (where people actually live/work): about 388ā€“400 cubic meters.

*Figures vary slightly by source as new hardware is added over time.

How big does that feel?

  • Roughly the size of a football/soccer field when you look at its full span across space.
  • Inside, think of a large multiā€‘room house: several bedroomsā€™ worth of space, plus labs, a gym, and work areas all arranged in a long tube of connected modules.
  • In volume, it is more than one and a half times the interior volume of a Boeing 747 airliner, but distributed through narrow cylindrical modules instead of one big cabin.

Why the numbers differ slightly

  • Agencies like NASA and ESA quote different dimensions depending on what they include:
    • Just the pressurized modules vs. the whole truss, radiators, and solar arrays.
* ā€œLengthā€ can mean the main modules, or the full structural truss endā€‘toā€‘end.
  • The station has grown over time with new modules and external structures, so older figures (from the 2000s or early 2010s) can be a bit smaller than current fact sheets.

Fun quick facts about its scale

  • It is the largest humanā€‘made structure ever assembled in orbit and one of the brightest objects in the night sky, sometimes visible to the naked eye at dawn or dusk.
  • Its acreā€‘sized solar arrays generate around 75ā€“90 kilowatts of power, enough to run dozens of average homes on Earth.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.