International Space Station

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The orbiting laboratory assembled from 1998, when the Zarya module launched, and continuously inhabited since the arrival of the Expedition 1 crew in November 2000. It is the only sustained microgravity research platform available to commercial users, which makes it the physical precondition for every in-space manufacturing business that currently exists: a company with a process to test has essentially one place to test it. Access is brokered through the ISS National Laboratory for the United States allocation and through agency agreements elsewhere. Its retirement is a scheduled economic event rather than a distant possibility — the partner agencies have committed to operations to 2030, and NASA awarded SpaceX a contract in June 2024 to build a United States Deorbit Vehicle to bring the structure down in a controlled re-entry afterwards. Several commercially owned stations have been proposed to succeed it, and whether any is flying before the station comes down is the central open question for the microgravity research market. Its orbit is inclined 51.6 degrees and it circles the Earth roughly every ninety minutes, so it has no fixed terrestrial position.

A node is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.