Celebrate 25 Years of Continual Human Habitation on the ISS with Sen's Stunning 4K Live Feed

On November 2, 2025, the ISS celebrates 25 years of continuous human habitation in space, and thanks to UK start up SEN you can see live pictures of the Earth from the space station in better quality than ever.

On November 2, 2000, NASA's Expedition 1 arrived at the International Space Station. Even though the ISS was still under construction at the time, not a single day has gone past since when there hasn't been a human presence on it. That feels like an achievement worth celebrating.

Part of that story has been being able to always pull up live images from the space station as it has orbited above our heads. NASA knows the value of this in PR terms. The first standard definition live feed from the ISS was established by the Agency  in 2000. HD was introduced a decade later, and then RED Dragon cameras helped upgrade the whole system to 4K in 2017.

And now it's better than ever. Thanks to ITVX recently carrying it as a free channel in the UK, we almost accidentally stumbled across Sen's live 4K video stream beamed directly from the ISS — and it's a significant step up from anything we've seen before outside of IMAX. You can watch the 4K live stream it's equipment on the ISS produces on YouTube here, and below is the stream's highlights reel for the week 16-22 October, 2025, so you can see the increase in quality over the standard NASA feed.

SpaceTV-1

The pictures are courtesy of Sen's own SpaceTV-1 camera suite, which was delivered to the ISS in March 2024. About the size of a small toaster, it consists of three cameras offering three different views. 

One camera, with a wide angle ‘panoramic’ lens, provides views of Earth’s horizon. Another camera looks straight down at Earth and films a scene around 240 km x 180 km (roughly 150 × 110 miles) with each pixel representing approximately 60m / 200 ft of the ground (“ground sample distance” or GSD). Another camera looks at the forward-facing docking port of the space station’s Harmony Module.

The 4K livestream is available for over 20 hours per day, with just a few hours a day of expected downtime due to routine loss of signal communications with the inter-satellite link relaying the video data to the ground.

How to Watch

Sen has a mobile app, and provides its streams free both at Sen.com and the company's YouTube channel. Also, hopefully the ITVX deal will see it becoming available on more international broadcast channels, which would be a good thing as it provides a moment of zen — a constant beguiling stream of them in fact — quite like anything else.