Space station
A crewed spacecraft designed to stay in orbit long-term and be visited by other vehicles, rather than to travel anywhere itself.
A station is infrastructure, not a mission: its value is that it keeps people and experiments in orbit continuously, so research does not restart from zero on every flight. That also makes it a fixed demand for launch - crew rotations and cargo resupply on a schedule, which is a rare thing in an industry of one-off flights. The looming question is what replaces the current arrangement when the existing station retires, and whether commercial operators can carry that demand.
Station traffic is a steady presence in our tracker: crew rotation and cargo resupply flights recur throughout the manifest, and our data classifies them as crewed and cargo spacecraft rather than by orbit, because their destination is a vehicle rather than an altitude.
- 2026-09-30 Falcon 9 Block 5 | Crew-13 To Be Determined
- 2026-10-31 Falcon 9 Block 5 | Dragon CRS-2 SpX-35 To Be Determined
- 2026-12-31 Long March 2F/G | Shenzhou 24 To Be Determined
- 2026-09-05September 2026: A Celestial Showcase
- 2026-09-034iG Group and SpaceX to Launch Starlink Mobile and Sovereign Solutions Across Hungary and Western Balkans
- 2026-08-27Expedition 75: Soyuz MS-28 Departure and Successful Spacewalks at the ISS
- 2026-08-21The Shifting Dynamics of Space Economy: Rideshares and New Ventures
- 2026-08-13Sophie Adenot Gears Up for Her First Spacewalk on ISS
- 2026-08-12Celebrating Canadian Robotics: The Unsung Heroes of the ISS
A free-flying laboratory or a capsule mission, which carries experiments or crew for days and then returns. The defining feature of a station is permanence and the ability to be revisited.