The ISS 'just appeared' - its footage is faked in a studio
Flat-earth claim
The claim
"Photos and videos of the space station are studio footage; the ISS simply appeared in the 2000s as part of selling the globe story."
The reality
The station did not appear anywhere - it was assembled in public, and the receipts predate every crew. The first piece, the Russian-controlled module Zarya, launched on a Proton rocket on 20 Nov 1998; sixteen days later Shuttle Endeavour (STS-88) brought the US-built node Unity, grappled Zarya with its robotic arm and mated the two - Cold War rivals bolting their hardware together in orbit. That was piece one of roughly forty; the Shuttle made 37 visits over thirteen assembly years, each launch tracked by radar networks worldwide, each module photographed being grabbed, aligned and connected. The station has been continuously crewed since 2 Nov 2000, and more than 270 people from about 20 countries have visited - the United States bought some of those seats from Russia, at roughly $90 M per seat in the 2020s. Studio footage does not contain a structure whose every orbit - sixteen a day - every nation's independent tracking network agrees on, to the second, forever.
The evidence
Run the reproducible version yourself: the station's orbital elements are published (celestrak.org), and from them its passes are predicted to the second - watch one on a clear evening, a naked-eye object brighter than any planet for about six minutes, photographed nightly from every country on Earth. Radio amateurs receive packets through the APRS digipeater the station carries and images through its SSTV repeater; schools talk to the crew live (ARISS, running since 2000). The drag that drags the orbit down and the announced re-boost burns that lift it back are tracked as events, not narrated as footage. Keeping the alternative going would require Russia's tracking networks, every other space agency, and millions of independent skywatchers to hold one story - see the corroboration card for why that is not a conspiracy, it is a construction site.