Facility 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 space agencies, as the core building blocks of the research capabilities they provide. Facilities are experimental apparatus that enable research, often (but not always) used for more than one experiment, such as centrifuges, furnaces, gloveboxes, freezers, and more. The US Orbital Segment of the ISS has been home to 191 such facilities, belonging to four of the five ISS international partner agencies as well as private companies, in its 25 years of continuous operation. Until now, there has been no public accounting or modeling of how they are used. Here, we present a statistical analysis of the usage of ISS facilities, based on data scraped from more than 4000 ISS daily reports dating from 2009 to 2024. The results are presented by facility and by facility category (as designated by NASA and as designated by us), and for both individual and pairwise use. By drawing this picture of research activity on the first permanently crewed space habitat in low Earth orbit, we provide insights that are useful for the design and planning of the next generation of space stations, including the co-location of facilities that tend to be used together as part of a broad space-based infrastructure. Raw data and code for replication and further analysis are available in in the GitHub repository of this paper. • ISS facility usage can be modeled by scraping names from NASA daily status reports. • “Multipurpose” and “human research” facilities were most frequently used overall. • Crew health has been an intensive activity theme throughout the survey period. • Research became more diverse, including robotics and in-space manufacturing. • Biology research facilities have the highest turnover rate. • 13 of the top 20 pairs of facilities included at least one “human research” facility.