Here's a HUGE new resource!https://issinrealtime.org/https://youtube.com/watch?v=niRdgB3BQB0
November 2, 2025 marks the 25th anniversary of continuous human presence onboard the International Space Station (ISS). My collaborator, David Charney, and I thought it would be cool to show the world each and every moment onboard.ISS in Real Time is a multimedia project that plays back all 9,131 days (and counting) onboard the ISS since it was first occupied. We achieve this using the very data and content that NASA has been releasing for all these years, but we present it in a unique way by placing everything back into the context of the mission as events unfolded.The term “multimedia” has fallen by the wayside, but it’s an apt description of what this is. If ISS in Real Time were a CD-ROM (the original multimedia format from the 1990s), it would be 3,846 CDs in size and growing.A few years ago, I built (along with a team of collaborators that includes Dave) Apollo in Real Time, which operates on a similar concept. Apollo missions with their analog tapes and physical film are much less cooperative when being turned into cohesive digital experiences than the ISS mission is. That said, the ISS mission has produced several orders of magnitude more data than Apollo did, and even though much of it is natively digital, getting the data to “cooperate” has been non-trivial. More details on our data wrangling are in the sections below.The Internet and its supporting technologies are just mature enough now to enable a project like this. Also, AI models are just now available that can do things like transcribe and translate audio and provide new ways to make up for poor historical metadata. Now is the time.
"Being inside NASA actually didn't help at all," said Feist. "If you're inside NASA and you want to use data, you have to make sure that it's public data. And because there's this concept in the government of export control, you have to never, ever make the mistake of publishing an image or something else that you found somewhere else without knowing if it's already public.""So even though we were at NASA, what we had to do was pretend we weren't there and find the data anywhere we could find it in the public already," he said.As it turned out, that worked fairly well for days beginning in 2008 and onwards. ISS occupancy, however, pre-dates a lot of the multimedia archives we take for granted today."This was the problem," said Feist. "If stuff was released publicly back then, it was done to media on tape. There was no such thing as streaming video in 2000 — YouTube wasn't invented until 2005. So there's just no way to go back in time on the internet and go find the treasure trove that we know exists internally. We know NASA has full days archived on tape, but It just hasn't been exported yet."Even after the change over to digital photography and video, there still remained the challenge of linking each file to the day, hour, minute and second that it was captured. For example, while the Internet Archive has been a tremendous source for the project, only sometimes do the videos it holds include the unique identifier that is needed to go determine what time the video was taken.In other situations, Feist turned to artificial intelligence to sort through the tens of thousands of files to learn if they were appropriate for inclusion."We know that NASA publishes all of its PAO [Public Affairs Office] photos to Flickr. Right now, there are about 80,000 photos in just the Johnson Space Center collection on Flickr alone. So we scraped those, and then I wrote an AI process as part of the pipeline to figure out which of those photos were flight photos and which of them were ground photos, so that we only show flight photos," he said.
OK, so I've taken my first look at it, and I'm confused about three things.1. The Apollo-In-Realtime (AIR) site(s) have a really cool nested time navigation feature where you see three stacked timelines, with the entire mission timeline at top, then an ~8 hour timeline around the current time below that, and then a 25 minutes timeline below that. It's an excellent way of jumping around in time. In this new ISS In Realtime (IIR) interface, I only see the 25-year calendar (with year popouts) and then a 24-hour timeline for the selected day. I can't zoom-in in time to closer than 24-hours, e.g. to a single hour, which makes navigating a particular dynamic event very difficult.2. I thought I read that this new system would render the orientation of the spacecraft, e.g. US segment forward, Russian segment forward, etc, based on the state vector information that has been getting logged.3. It seems like I'm only seeing / hearing comms for one side of the conversation, either S->G or G->S. For example, in the featured Charlie Duke visit to the ISS control room, you only hear Charlie. The UI says all channels are unmuted.In all cases, am I missing something? If I am, then they need to have a little UI intro on the home page, and make that reachable with a little help button (e.g. "?" symbol) in the upper right corner. Because I looked pretty hard and didn't find them, and your average person will bail a LOT faster.Posting here because I don't want to create a whole account just to post on their own forum. Hopefully the authors will see this, or someone here can let them know they've got some high-quality QA feedback here
Quote from: ChrisC on 11/02/2025 11:10 pmPosting here because I don't want to create a whole account just to post on their own forum. Hopefully the authors will see this, or someone here can let them know they've got some high-quality QA feedback here Ask them, Chris, if they're willing to publish a walkthrough, how-to, or tutorial video. You might not be the only one.
Posting here because I don't want to create a whole account just to post on their own forum. Hopefully the authors will see this, or someone here can let them know they've got some high-quality QA feedback here
