The International Space StationThe high-precision chronograph – El Primero Striking 10TH – has taken off into space
Above our heads – at an altitude of 400 km – floats an impressive mass of some 400 tonnes. This flying giant is not some lost asteroid, but the International Space Station ISS, orbiting around the Earth. The laboratory is continually inhabited by a crew of six astronauts. In December 2010, a Swiss watch – the ZENITH El Primero Striking 10TH – left the Earth on board a Russian Soyuz rocket, launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. This high-precision chronograph was taken into orbit in the Columbus module by a European astronaut as part of a European Space Agency program.
The International Space Station (ISS) is like a giant 400-tonne puzzle to which laboratory modules developed by the countries participating in the program are attached. When the structure is completed, sometime next year, the station will be 110 m long and will have around 15 pressurized modules. This space mammoth travels at the prodigious speed of 27,700 km/h, circling our planet in about an hour and a half. The station houses an international crew of six people who spend about six months on board.