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## Background   During the past two decades, advances in sequencing technology have enabled the census of microbial members of many 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 report results of the characterization  of the microbial ecology of a singular built environment, the International Space Station (ISS). This ISS sampling involved the collection and microbial analysis (via 16S rDNA PCR) of 15 samples swabbed from surfaces onboard the ISS. This sampling is a component of Project MERCCURI - a collaborative effort of the UC Davis "microbiology of the Built Environment network" (microBEnet) project, Science Cheerleaders, NanoRacks, Space Florida, and Scistarter.com.  Learning more about the microbial inhabitants of the "buildings" in which we travel through space will take on increasing importance, as plans for human 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 a study of  cell phone phones  and shoe samples shoes  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. We compared the ISS swabs to both the Earth homes and the Human Microbiome Project. ## Conclusions/Significance  While significantly different from both the homes on Earth and the Human Microbiome Project samples analyzed here, the microbial community composition on the ISS was more similar to home surfaces than to the human microbiome samples. The ISS surfaces are species-rich (1036-4294 OTUs/sample at a 97% sequence similarity threshold). Perhaps due to the small samples size we were able to obtain, there was no discernible biogeography of microbes on the 15 ISS surfaces.