Space Station

The Space Station (Referred to as the International Space Station by Jeremie) is a location of one of the supercomputers X.A.N.A. located four hundred kilometers above the Earth and used to sustain one of his Replikas. It had been constructed by the government fairly recently; the Lyoko Warriors had arrived ten days ahead of a new set of astronauts, as informed by Jeremie in A Space Oddity. The station itself has no artificial gravity, as Odd and Yumi discovered when they first arrived. X.A.N.A. used this station to hold the Replika of Sector Five and to create a large amount of silver orbs that could not only grow and retract spikes while firing themselves through anti-gravity to attack their targets, but could also generate a high amount of heat strong enough to melt through metal. Odd ingeniously destroyed it as a result of water damage by thinking of Kiwi. All of the matte paintings of the station were made by Frédéric Perrin, and the station itself resembles the real-life Mir space station, which operated from 1986 to 2001 by the Soviet Union and later by Russia.

Trivia

• The Space Station is one of two XANA-infected facilities that is not abandoned, with the other being the Jungle Research Facility.
• Upon arriving at the station, Jeremie specifically states that Odd and Yumi are aboard the International Space Station, making this the only time in the series where a real-world location is visited and described by name.
• Because the space station is directly named and has a real life counterpart, the two can be directly compared. This reveals several innacuracies, many of which are likely for the sake of plot, though others appear to simply be mistakes.
• Jeremie refers to the station as the "brand new International Space Station". However, the exterior shots are based on the Mir station (in fact, it appears to be an exact replication as can be seen when comparing similar photographs such as this one [1]), which was only operated until 2001, before the events of the series. Furthermore, Jeremie refers to the ISS as "brand new", however the ISS was first launched into orbit in 1998 and became habitable in 2000, making the station atleast five years old by the time of the episode's setting.
• During the events of the episode, the station is uninhabitabed, with Jeremie stating a new team of astronauts is arriving in ten days. In reality, both the ISS and Mir always had at least one person on board at all times throughout their service life. This was likely done for plot convenience, though it could potentially be explained as an emergency leading all crew to evacuate, leaving XANA with an opportunity to infect its supercomputer.
• While the exterior of the station is based on a real-world example, the interior is entirely fictional, with a large amount of artistic freedom. Namely, wide open spaces (the wide open rooms seen throughout the station are impossible to launch into space with even modern day rocket technology), with interior space in real life space stations relegated to interconnected corridors which are assembled in orbit.
• During the exterior shot when Odd opens the station's airlock, the exact location can be seen as materials fly out. Somewhat humorously, if one compares the scene to a real photo of Mir, which the station is modelled after, it is revealed that this airlock is actually the main thruster of a docked Soyuz spacecraft.

Gallery

The space station from inside.

One hatch is opened by Odd to get rid of the metal orbs.

XANA's metal orbs are sucked outside the Space Staton.

Odd breaks a water pipe inside the Spacd Station.

The Supercomputer gets wet and shortcircuits