Space station finishes its solar power upgrade; it passes nearly overhead in San Jose on Nov. 12

Astronauts on the International Space Station finished a power upgrade that began in 2021, NASA's station blog reports.  On Thursday, Nov. 5, NASA's Anil Menon and the Canadian Space Agency's Joshua Kutryk spent 6 hours, 59 minutes outside, installing and unrolling the eighth and final new solar array.  The station can now make about 215 kilowatts, up from 160, a gain of about a third by our arithmetic.

What changed

The new panels, called roll-out solar arrays, unroll like a rug and add power on top of the station's eight original wings.  Installing all eight took 18 spacewalks.  Thursday's was the 286th spacewalk to build or maintain the station, Menon's fifth and Kutryk's second; the same pair installed the seventh array Oct. 29.

For scale:  the station is 356 feet end to end, one yard short of a football field with end zones, and has more living space than a six-bedroom house.  It circles Earth every 90 minutes at about 5 miles per second, roughly 260 miles up, by our calculation.  People have lived aboard without a break since November 2000, 26 years this month.

See it from San Jose

The station looks like a very bright star gliding across the sky, with no blinking lights, NASA says.  It shines only by reflected sunlight, so it shows up shortly after sunset or before dawn.  Our calculations for downtown San Jose, from orbit data published Saturday:

• Tuesday, Nov. 10, about 6:00 p.m.:  4 minutes, from the south-southwest to the east, about a third of the way up the sky.
• Wednesday, Nov. 11, about 6:49 p.m.:  3 minutes, from the west-southwest, fading out halfway up in the northwest.
• Thursday, Nov. 12, about 6:01 p.m.:  the best pass, 5 minutes, from the southwest to nearly overhead and down toward the northeast.  A thin crescent moon, 11 percent lit, sits low in the west until 7:20 p.m.

Sunset is about 5 p.m.  Times can shift a minute or two as the orbit changes, so check NASA's Spot the Station app that day.  The National Weather Service calls for mostly clear skies Tuesday and Wednesday nights and partly cloudy skies Thursday night, with a slight chance of rain after 10 p.m.

Worth it?  Yes, even downtown.  It takes five minutes, needs no telescope and no dark site, and Thursday's pass is about as good as they get.

Source:  NASA space station blog, "Spacewalkers Install Final Roll-Out Solar Array" (Nov. 5, 2026) and earlier posts Nov. 4 and 5; NASA, "Space Station Facts and Figures" and "Spot the Station"; pass times calculated by the paper from U.S. Space Force orbital elements published by CelesTrak (Nov. 7, 2026); U.S. Naval Observatory sun and moon data for San Jose, Pacific Standard Time; National Weather Service San Jose forecast issued 3 a.m. Nov. 7.  Drafted by AI for San Jose using NASA source material.  NASA did not write or review this story.