xkcd.WTF!?

Explanation ➲

This comic plays on different meanings of the word 'space': firstly as the invisible character between words, and secondly as in the void between astronomical bodies. In this case, it is claimed that the word 'space' was never meant to be part of the name of the International Space Station, but was included as a word due to a transcription error.

The presumption is therefore that someone thought it necessary to say the name as "International [space] Station," perhaps to quash any misconception that the intended name might be "InternationalStation" (however capitalised). Someone else would have written this down as "International Space Station". The resulting accidental name was then accepted, due to it being apt or inconvenient to change.

The title text furthers the joke by transcribing the exclamation mark at the end of the phrase. The word 'point' can sometimes be used to refer to a specific location within a wider space, such as a muster point. The "International Space Station Exclamation Point", then, may sound like it refers to a named location in the International Space Station (the "Exclamation Point") that is specifically intended for making exclamations (such as the one in the title text). (Turning a punctuation mark into a voiced part of a statement in this way is similar to 3143: Question Mark; there were also multiple examples of strings with punctuation (literal and otherwise) and spelling easy to misconvey in 1963: Namespace Land Rush, though none of them used either spaces or "space"s.)

Similar problems to these can occur when customers order signboards. They sometimes come with unintended quotation marks, because the customer writes the signage text with quotation marks, with the expectation that the signmaker will ignore them. Or they may give the order verbally, resulting in similar problems as seen in the comic. Or even more comprehensive failures may occur.

While the ISS had other names during its design, such as Space Station Freedom or Alpha, it does not appear that NASA or Roscosmos literally originally referred to it as just International Station. The Russian name for it is "Международная Kосмическая Cтанция" (MKC) or "Mezhdunaródnaya Kosmícheskaya Stántsiya", which translates as "International Space Station" using the cosmic, non-punctuation meaning of "space".

The ISS crew was in headlines on 15 January 2026, the day before the comic, when NASA and SpaceX returned some crew members to Earth, earlier than scheduled, because of an unspecified medical concern.