Build your own International Space Station

You can build your own model of the ISS. Look carefully at the drawing and find material that looks similar to the modules. You can use empty soda cans or empty crisp tubes, toilet rolls, wooden skewers, sticks or pipe wires, glue, scissors, aluminium foil, string, white or coloured paper, felt-tip pens, etc.

1) Modules: service modules, laboratories, nodes, storage modules, etc.
For the modules you can use the empty cans or the crisp tubes. To connect two cans together glue half a toilet roll in between. This makes it look as though the different modules are connected by a corridor.

Use the paper and the coloured felt-tip pens to decorate each of your modules and give them a name matching their use: service module? scientific laboratory? node?

2) Solar panels:
Solar panels are very big, flat and long so they can catch a lot of light from the Sun. Use 15 cm of the aluminium foil and cut it into strips of 5 cm wide. Put two sticks in side with 1 cm in between and fold the aluminium round the sticks.

To attach the solar panels, put a stick through the panel and the toilet roll.

3) and 4) Radiators:
Cut two strips of white paper of 1,25 cm wide and 12,5 cm long. Fold the strips in half over the top of the stick and secure the ends with tape. The radiators should point downward.

5) To let the station float in space:
When you have fixed all the modules together, tie the string around the module in the middle so both ends are in balance and hang it up in the classroom. Now you can let your station float freely.