Departing Space Station Commander Provides Tour of Orbital Laboratory

This is awesome. If you'd like a live video tour, I recently sat down with my 5 year old to watch a wonderful video from NASA [0]. They talk about some of the facilities in a way that kids can understand, and there's something wondrous about seeing how they move around, regularly changing their orientations, etc. [0] [this video]

There's a great 25 minute tour of the ISS by Sunita Williams on NASA's YouTube channel along with commentary on how life works up there. [this video]

Why no 2001-style rotating orbital station? Probably because it's not easy, it'll be big and heavy, and Big and Heavy and Orbital is definitely not cheap. Moving mass — people moving around — within a rotating structure will transmit vibrations throughout the structure, even with mass dampening. As an example of the considerations around vibrations within ISS, astronaut Sunita Williams indicated that the ISS exercise equipment is intentionally isolated from the ISS structure, as the vibrations of the crew members exercising causes problems for the solar arrays. Source: [this video]