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#Abstract  ## Background   Project MERCCURI is (was?) a collaborative effort of UC Davis (microBEnet), Science Cheerleader, NanoRacks, Space Florida, and Scistarter.com. There are (were?) three aims for Project MERCCURI Aim 1 involves swabbing surfaces from sporting venues and other high-profile built-environment locations. This component includes a concurrent outreach effort in which 2000 "Citizen Scientists" are asked to contribute swabs of their cell phones and shoes. Aim 2 is a bacterial growth assay, in which non-pathogenic microbes collected from the surfaces in Aim 1, "compete" against each other, both on the surface of the Earth (at UC Davis) and onboard the International Space Station (ISS). Aim 3, the results of which are presented here, involves swabbing of 15 surfaces onboard the ISS to collect microbes for DNA-sequenced-based identification.  _ALTERNATE VERSION:_  _Project MERCCURI is a collaborative effort of UC Davis (microBEnet), Science Cheerleader, NanoRacks, Space Florida, and Scistarter.com. Part of this project was the collection and microbial analysis of 15 swabs taken from surfaces onboard the International Space Station (ISS). _ Over the past decade, two decades,  advances in sequencing technology have enabled the census of microbial members of many earthly natural  ecosystems. More recently, attention is increasingly being paid to the microbial residents of our man-made, built ecosystems, both private (homes) and very public (subways, office buildings, and hospitals.) Here, we contribute to our understanding of the microbial ecology of a singular built environment, the ISS. Getting to know International Space Station (ISS). Developing an understanding of  the microbial inhabitants of the "buildings" in which we travel through space, space  will take onan  increasing importance importance,  as plans for manned exploration and colonization of our solar system come to fruition. Project MERCCURI is a collaborative effort of UC Davis (microBEnet), Science Cheerleader, NanoRacks, Space Florida, and Scistarter.com. One component of this project was the collection and microbial analysis (via 16S rDNA PCR) of 15 samples swabbed from surfaces onboard the ISS.  ## Methodology/Principal Findings  Sterile swabs were used to sample 15 surfaces onboard the International Space Station. The sites sampled were designed to be analogous to samples collected for 1) the Wildlife of Our Homes project and 2) the cell phone and shoe samples that were concurrently being collected for another component of Project MERCCURI. Sequencing of the 16S rRNA genes amplified from DNA extracted from each swab was used to produce a "census" of the microbes present on each surface sampled.