International Space Station
Education and cultural outreach

The ISS crew provides opportunities for students on Earth by running student-developed experiments, making educational demonstrations, allowing for student participation in classroom versions of ISS experiments, and directly engaging students using radio, and email. ESA offers a wide range of free teaching materials that can be downloaded for use in classrooms. In one lesson, students can navigate a 3D model of the interior and exterior of the ISS, and face spontaneous challenges to solve in real time.

The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) aims to inspire children to "pursue craftsmanship" and to heighten their "awareness of the importance of life and their responsibilities in society". Through a series of education guides, students develop a deeper understanding of the past and near-term future of crewed space flight, as well as that of Earth and life. In the JAXA "Seeds in Space" experiments, the mutation effects of spaceflight on plant seeds aboard the ISS are explored by growing sunflower seeds that have flown on the ISS for about nine months. In the first phase of Kibō utilisation from 2008 to mid-2010, researchers from more than a dozen Japanese universities conducted experiments in diverse fields.

Cultural activities are another major objective of the ISS programme. Tetsuo Tanaka, the director of JAXA's Space Environment and Utilization Center, has said: "There is something about space that touches even people who are not interested in science."

Amateur Radio on the ISS (ARISS) is a volunteer programme that encourages students worldwide to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, through amateur radio communications opportunities with the ISS crew. ARISS is an international working group, consisting of delegations from nine countries including several in Europe, as well as Japan, Russia, Canada, and the United States. In areas where radio equipment cannot be used, speakerphones connect students to ground stations which then connect the calls to the space station.

First Orbit is a 2011 feature-length documentary film about Vostok 1, the first crewed space flight around the Earth. By matching the orbit of the ISS to that of Vostok 1 as closely as possible, in terms of ground path and time of day, documentary filmmaker Christopher Riley and ESA astronaut Paolo Nespoli were able to film the view that Yuri Gagarin saw on his pioneering orbital space flight. This new footage was cut together with the original Vostok 1 mission audio recordings sourced from the Russian State Archive. Nespoli is credited as the director of photography for this documentary film, as he recorded the majority of the footage himself during Expedition 26 / 27. The film was streamed in a global YouTube premiere in 2011 under a free licence through the website firstorbit.org.

In May 2013, commander Chris Hadfield shot a music video of David Bowie 's " Space Oddity " on board the station, which was released on YouTube. It was the first music video filmed in space.

In November 2017, while participating in Expedition 52 / 53 on the ISS, Paolo Nespoli made two recordings of his spoken voice (one in English and the other in his native Italian), for use on Wikipedia articles. These were the first content made in space specifically for Wikipedia.

In November 2021, a virtual reality exhibit called The Infinite featuring life aboard the ISS was announced.
detectable_content:postscript