Did you watch the whole video? Structurally, the ISS is a joke.
You actually saw astronauts working on it?
Also, if Chris Hadfield says he has been on the ISS...then it surely must be true.
Giggle x 2
With the right equipment (200 mm reflector telescope with motorised tracking) you could just see the new modules being put into place, although the actual astronauts themselves were not discernible. Must have been 2009 or maybe 2010. Lots of fun.
Its not only Chis Hadfield who'd have to be lying about it. It would also have to be the 200 odd other people who've been on the ISS, from 15 different countries.
As well as the hundreds, possibly thousands, of engineers and technicians who've guided US, Russian, German, French and Japanese rocket flights to the station.
Seems like a lot of people need to by lying all the time to keep a hoax/conspiracy going for no discernible purpose. Seriously, what's the motivation? Where's the benefit or gain for all this effort?
On the physical stuff, the engineering of the ISS is pretty well known and no mystery to anyone that's had any interest in spaces stuff in the last two decades.
A couple of years ago, I even got to work for a little while with some of the EADS/Airbus engineers who had worked on the ISS transfer vehicles (although they'd both since switched to marketing, ewww). It's always interesting to hear the thinking of engineers about problem solving, and how the demands of space differ from the demands of traditional aircraft engineering. Getting anything into orbit is crazy stressful, both for humans and the spacecraft themselves.
