Facilities Usage on the International Space Station

Science experiments on the International Space Station (ISS) - and in future space habitats - require“facilities,” as they are known to the space agencies, as the core building blocks of the researchcapabilities they provide. Facilities are pieces of equipment that enable research, such as centrifuges,furnaces, gloveboxes, freezers, and more. The ISS has been home to 191 such facilities in its 24years of continuous operation, but until now, there has been no public accounting or modeling of how they are used. Here we present a statistical analysis of ISS facility usage, based on data scraped from more than 4,000 ISS daily reports dating from 2009 to 2024. The results are presented by facilityand by facility category (as designated by NASA and as designated by us), and for both individualand pairwise use. By drawing this picture of research activity on the first permanently crewed spacehabitat in low Earth orbit, we provide insights that are useful for the design and planning of the nextgeneration of space stations, including the co-location of facilities that tend to be used together aspart of a broad space-based infrastructure. Raw data and code for replication and further analysis isavailable in this paper’s Github repository.