Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com @BednarChuck

The International Space Station (ISS) has been in service for nearly 15 years, been visited by hundreds of astronauts, travelled well over 1.5 billion miles and provided invaluable scientific research. But have you ever stopped to wonder why it looks so odd?

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Lets face it, as wonderful as the ISS is, it doesnt look near as badass as the orbital outposts that are depicted in science fiction (Star Treks Deep Space 9 or the Death Star, for example). So why did NASA and its international colleagues choose to give it such an unusual shape?

As it turns out, they didnt, according to Robert Frost, an instructor and engineer in the US space agencys Flight Operations Directorate and the author of a Quora article (reprinted by Gizmodo) that dishes the dirt on why the station lacks the sleek designs of its fictional counterparts.

Where a fictional spacecraft has the luxury of having its design dictated by style, real spacecraft are constrained by budget, tradeoffs, and practicality, Frost wrote. Every feature of the ISS can be explained by those words.

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We dont yet have the technology to do construction in space, so we have to assemble a large vehicle in space from launch-able components, he added. At the time of the ISS assembly, the two mechanisms for getting a large payload to space were the Space Shuttle Orbiter and the Russian Proton rocket. Those two sentences explain a lot of the ISS appearance.

Frost went on to explain that the ISS had to be assembled from pieces that were small enough to find in the space shuttles payload bay, or in the cargo compartment of a Proton rocket. As such, the maximum length and diameter of these components were limited, forcing crews to rely upon pieces that were primarily cylindrical in shape and able to be linked together.

Parts had to fly themselves

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Why is the ISS shaped so weirdly?