The ISS looks impossibly far away. It's a 4-hour drive straight up.
Photos of the Space Station floating against pitch-black space make it look like it's out in deep space somewhere. It's not. It orbits about 408 km up — closer to the ground than some countries are to their own nearest neighbor.
Drive there, straight up
Earth, shrunk to a basketball
Both of these are the same 408 km, just measured two different ways. At 65 mph — a normal US highway speed — a straight-up drive to the ISS takes 3 hours 54 minutes. That's less time than a flight from New York to Los Angeles.
Shrink Earth down to an official-size basketball (9.4 inches across) and the ISS's orbit sits about 7.6 mm above the surface — roughly the width of a pencil. Mount Everest and every commercial flight in the sky would fit inside a sliver thinner than a sheet of paper on that same ball.
The Kármán line — the internationally recognized "edge of space," 100 km up — is itself less than a quarter of the way to the ISS. Space starts a lot closer than orbit does.
ISS altitude: 408 km, the same figure used on our Point Nemo and closer-to-orbit maps. Driving time assumes a constant 65 mph with no traffic, atmosphere, or physics getting in the way. Basketball diameter: official NBA/FIBA size (29.5 in circumference). Earth's mean diameter: 12,742 km.