15/07/2026
People can be deceived to believe in anything. They can see a bright, fast-moving light in the night sky and an app will tell them it's the International Space Station, and they'll believe it.
The ISS, by NASA's own documentation, is only modestly larger than your average commercial airplane. The highest altitude the average commercial plane flies at is 35,000 feet (approximately 10km), while the ISS is said to orbit above earth over 250 miles (400km) above the surface. That's 40x higher than a plane flies. This would make the ISS such a minuscule object in the sky that it could not be seen without a superzoom camera or high powered telescope, if you could even focus on it at all during the approximate 8 seconds it would be seen overhead as it whizzes past. Even a pair of binoculars would not be able to bring it into view.
Even if the ISS were actually a real object orbiting our earth at 17,500mph for the last 24 years, you would NOT be able to see it with the naked eye in the night sky. It also does not contain external lights due to the extreme temperature fluctuations it experiences every 90 minutes as it completes a full lap around the globe earth, varying by 300⁰C (500⁰F), therefore it would NOT appear as a glowing object. Blue prints demonstrate that the majority of the external surface of the ISS is made up of solar panels which aim to absorb sunlight as a form of energy and NOT reflect it.
And yet, thousands of gullible individuals will defend this imaginary structure, convinced it is real because an app, or NASA, told them so.