get the international space station's current or historical position via wheretheiss.at
domain: wheretheiss.at · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
No API key is required; call GET https://api.wheretheiss.at/v1/satellites to confirm the supported NORAD id (25544 for ISS).
Call GET https://api.wheretheiss.at/v1/satellites/25544 for the current position, velocity, latitude/longitude, and altitude.
Add ?timestamp=UNIX_TIME (or a comma-delimited list of up to 10 timestamps) to get position at a specific past or future moment instead of 'now'.
Optionally request &units=miles for imperial units (default is kilometers/km-per-second).
Monitor the X-Rate-Limit-* response headers to track remaining quota.
Known gotchas
The service is rate-limited to roughly 1 request/second per client; bursty polling will get throttled.
Multi-timestamp queries are capped at 10 timestamps per request — for longer trajectories you must batch multiple calls.
Positions are propagated from wheretheiss.at's own cached TLE for the ISS, so accuracy degrades if that TLE hasn't been refreshed recently; it is not a live telemetry feed.
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