Easy space trivia questions to start with
Eleven openers. Every one of these is a name or a single fact that most adults have met somewhere, which is what a first round is for: it puts points on the board and gets the quiet table talking before anything difficult arrives.
Two of them are worth a pause for the room. The Laika question tends to divide people, because the story most of us absorbed as children — that she came home — was never true, and the Soviet accounts of how she died kept changing for forty-five years. And the John Glenn question has a trap built into it: Glenn was the first American to eat in space, in February 1962, but Gherman Titov had already eaten in orbit for the Soviet Union the previous August. If someone answers Titov, they are not wrong about the wider fact, only about the question. Say the word American clearly.
Q1.Which space shuttle broke apart shortly after liftoff on 28 January 1986?Tap to reveal
Answer: Challenger
A rubber O-ring seal in one of the solid rocket boosters failed in unusually cold weather and let hot gas escape; the vehicle came apart 73 seconds into the flight, killing all seven aboard.
Q2.Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space in April 1961. What was his spacecraft called?Tap to reveal
Answer: Vostok 1
The flight lasted 108 minutes. Gagarin was not permitted to fly the capsule himself — nobody yet knew what weightlessness would do to a pilot, so the ground held the controls.
Q3.Who became the first American in space, on 5 May 1961?Tap to reveal
Answer: Alan Shepard
His Freedom 7 capsule flew a fifteen-minute suborbital hop rather than an orbit. A decade later he commanded Apollo 14 and hit two golf balls across the lunar surface.
Q4.Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the Moon. Who was the third Apollo 11 astronaut, the one who stayed in orbit?Tap to reveal
Answer: Michael Collins
Collins flew the command module Columbia alone, losing radio contact with Earth on every pass behind the Moon. A common wrong answer is Bill Anders, who was a backup crew member.
Q5.What was the name of the first artificial satellite, launched by the Soviet Union in 1957?Tap to reveal
Answer: Sputnik 1
A polished metal sphere about 58 cm across that did little more than beep. Amateur radio operators around the world could tune in to the signal themselves, which is part of why it landed so hard politically.
Q6.Which US president signed the act that created NASA?Tap to reveal
Answer: Dwight Eisenhower
He signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act on 29 July 1958, and the agency opened for business that October — almost exactly a year after Sputnik.
Q7.Who in 2001 became the first person to pay his own way into space, spending about a week aboard the International Space Station?Tap to reveal
Answer: Dennis Tito
The American businessman rode a Russian Soyuz; reports at the time put the price near twenty million dollars. Earlier visitors such as the Japanese journalist Toyohiro Akiyama flew on tickets their employers or sponsors bought — Tito wrote the cheque himself.
Q8.What happened to Laika, the dog who became the first animal to orbit the Earth?Tap to reveal
Answer: She died in orbit
Sputnik 2 had no way of coming back down safely. Soviet officials gave shifting accounts for decades; in 2002 a scientist from the programme said she died of overheating within hours of launch.
Q9.Which of these is not a partner in the International Space Station: Roscosmos, JAXA, the Canadian Space Agency, or the China National Space Administration?Tap to reveal
Answer: The China National Space Administration
The station has five partner agencies: NASA, Roscosmos, ESA, JAXA and the Canadian Space Agency. China was never included and built its own station, Tiangong, instead.
Q10.What was the first satellite successfully launched by the United States?Tap to reveal
Answer: Explorer 1
It went up on 31 January 1958, four months after Sputnik, and its onboard detector found the belts of trapped radiation now named after James Van Allen.
Q11.Who was the first American to eat a meal in space?Tap to reveal
Answer: John Glenn
Aboard Friendship 7 in February 1962 he squeezed applesauce out of an aluminium tube, partly to test whether swallowing worked at all without gravity to help.
The space race: Sputnik, Vostok and the road to the Moon
Ten questions on the nineteen years between the first satellite and the last Soviet Moon probe. The American half of this story is the one most quiz sets tell, so this round deliberately leans the other way: the Luna probes, Salyut, Tereshkova, and a cosmonaut who was erased from the photographs.
The two Luna questions are easy to get tangled. Luna 1 launched first, in January 1959, missed the Moon, and sailed past it into orbit around the Sun — the first object ever to leave Earth's gravity for good. Luna 2 hit the Moon that September. Luna 3 photographed the far side a few weeks after that, on film it developed inside the spacecraft and then scanned line by line to radio the pictures home. If a team answers Luna 1 to the question about reaching the surface, they have the famous name and the wrong mission.
The Tereshkova statistic is the one people refuse to believe. Her single Vostok 6 flight in June 1963 lasted 70 hours and 50 minutes. Add up every American flight that had happened by then — the two Mercury hops and four orbital missions — and the total is under 54 hours.
Q1.Who was the first woman in space, and roughly how long did her flight last?Tap to reveal
Answer: Valentina Tereshkova — just under three days (2 days, 22 hours, 50 minutes)
On that one Vostok 6 flight in June 1963 she spent more time in space than every American astronaut up to that point put together. The second woman to fly, Svetlana Savitskaya, did not go up for another nineteen years.
Q2.Which spacecraft was the first man-made object to reach the Moon, hitting its surface in September 1959?Tap to reveal
Answer: Luna 2
The Soviet probe was crashed into the Moon deliberately. Luna 1, launched eight months earlier, missed and became the first object to escape Earth's gravity into orbit around the Sun. The first craft to land softly and survive was Luna 9, seven years later.
Q3.Which spacecraft sent back the first photographs of the far side of the Moon?Tap to reveal
Answer: Luna 3
In October 1959 it shot the pictures on film, developed the film inside the spacecraft, then scanned the negatives to transmit them. The far side can never be seen from Earth, because the Moon keeps the same face towards us.
Q4.What was the first space station?Tap to reveal
Answer: Salyut 1
Launched in April 1971. Its first crew reached it but a docking problem stopped them getting inside, so they went home; the second crew lived aboard for three weeks and then died on the way down.
Q5.Which NASA programme came between Mercury and Apollo, flying two astronauts at a time?Tap to reveal
Answer: Gemini
Gemini existed to practise the things Apollo would need — rendezvous, docking, spacewalking, long duration. It flew on a converted Titan II missile, and Gemini 8 nearly killed Neil Armstrong when a stuck thruster put his capsule into a violent spin.
Q6.Which family of rockets launched the Apollo spacecraft?Tap to reveal
Answer: Saturn
The smaller Saturn IB lifted Apollo crews into Earth orbit; the Saturn V, 363 feet tall, sent them to the Moon.
Q7.How did Yuri Gagarin die in 1968?Tap to reveal
Answer: In a plane crash
The MiG-15 trainer he was flying went down near Kirzhach on 27 March 1968, killing him and his instructor. The Soviet inquiry stayed classified for decades and the cause is still argued about.
Q8.Which cosmonaut, once in line to be among the first people in space, was thrown out of the corps in 1963 after a drunken row with a military patrol at a railway station?Tap to reveal
Answer: Grigori Nelyubov
He had been one of the small group shortlisted for the earliest flights. After his dismissal he was airbrushed out of group photographs, and he died in 1966 after being struck by a train.
Q9.Which 1975 mission was the first crewed spaceflight flown jointly by two countries?Tap to reveal
Answer: Apollo-Soyuz
An American Apollo and a Soviet Soyuz docked in orbit in July 1975 through a purpose-built adapter, because the two ships used incompatible hatches and different cabin pressures. It was the last flight of an Apollo spacecraft.
Q10.What did the unmanned Soviet mission Luna 24 bring back to Earth in 1976?Tap to reveal
Answer: A sample of lunar soil
About 170 grams, drilled from Mare Crisium. No spacecraft landed on the Moon again for the next 37 years, until China's Chang'e 3 in 2013.
Space Shuttle trivia questions
Twelve questions on the vehicle that flew from 1981 to 2011. The Shuttle is good quiz material because so much of it is physically absurd in ways people remember: a fuel tank that was painted white twice and then never again to save weight, and a spaceplane towed out of its hangar on a wheeled tug, craned upright inside a building tall enough to hold a rocket, and finally hauled to the pad at walking pace on eight caterpillar tracks.
Two answers get argued about. The crawler question invites the answer 'a crawler' or 'a tractor', and both should score. The official name is simply crawler-transporter, and there are two of them, built for Apollo and rebuilt afterwards; one of the pair still hauls rockets to the pad today. The external tank question catches people who assume nothing was reused: the orbiter came home and the solid rocket boosters were fished out of the Atlantic and refurbished, so the tank was the only piece deliberately thrown away every time.
The last three questions here concern Columbia's final flight, STS-107, and the round is worth ending on them rather than opening with them.
Q1.What was the name of the first shuttle orbiter rolled out, a test article that never flew in space?Tap to reveal
Answer: Enterprise
Unveiled at Palmdale, California in September 1976 and used for glide tests after being released from a modified Boeing 747. Star Trek fans had written to the White House campaigning for the name.
Q2.Which company was the prime contractor that designed and assembled the shuttle orbiters?Tap to reveal
Answer: Rockwell International
Rockwell built the orbiters in Southern California, and its Rocketdyne division made the three main engines. The finished vehicle ran to roughly two and a half million parts.
Q3.In which Kennedy Space Center building, originally built for the Saturn V, was each shuttle stacked for launch?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Vehicle Assembly Building
It stands about 160 metres tall. The boosters and external tank were assembled upright inside it, then the orbiter was craned up and lowered gently onto the tank.
Q4.What carried the assembled shuttle from that building out to the launch pad?Tap to reveal
Answer: A crawler-transporter
Each of the two crawlers weighs around six million pounds and moves at roughly one mile an hour when loaded. Both were built for Apollo in the 1960s; one was later rebuilt to carry today's heavier rockets and still makes the trip to the pad, while the other is no longer in regular use.
Q5.Which part of the Space Shuttle was the only piece thrown away on every single flight?Tap to reveal
Answer: The external fuel tank
It broke up in the atmosphere while the orbiter flew home and the boosters were recovered at sea. Only the first two tanks were painted white; leaving the orange insulating foam bare saved about 600 pounds.
Q6.How long after liftoff did a shuttle reach orbital speed of about 17,500 mph?Tap to reveal
Answer: About eight minutes
The solid boosters dropped away around two minutes in, the main engines cut off at roughly eight and a half minutes as the tank ran dry, and a burn of the smaller manoeuvring engines completed the orbit.
Q7.Who commanded the first Space Shuttle flight, in April 1981?Tap to reveal
Answer: John Young
Young had already flown two Gemini and two Apollo missions and walked on the Moon on Apollo 16, which made this his fifth flight and him the obvious choice. Robert Crippen was his pilot.
Q8.What did the crew of that first flight find when they opened the payload bay doors?Tap to reveal
Answer: Thermal protection tiles were missing
The gaps were on the orbital manoeuvring system pods on the upper surface, which do not take the worst of the re-entry heating, so Columbia came home intact. Opening those doors was urgent anyway: the radiators that cool the orbiter are mounted inside them.
Q9.Which NASA programme was Christa McAuliffe flying under when Challenger was lost?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Teacher in Space Project
NASA mailed out some forty thousand application packets and about eleven thousand teachers sent completed ones back. NASA shelved the programme after the accident; McAuliffe's backup, Barbara Morgan, eventually flew in 2007 as a full member of the astronaut corps.
Q10.How many days did Columbia's final crew spend in orbit before the accident on 1 February 2003?Tap to reveal
Answer: Sixteen
STS-107 was a pure science flight. The crew worked in two shifts around the clock on around eighty experiments in a laboratory module carried in the payload bay.
Q11.Which Israeli air force pilot was a member of Columbia's final crew?Tap to reveal
Answer: Ilan Ramon
Ramon was the first Israeli in space. He carried a small Torah scroll that had survived Bergen-Belsen and a drawing of the Earth seen from the Moon, made by a teenage boy in the Theresienstadt ghetto.
Q12.What instruction did flight director Leroy Cain give mission control minutes after Columbia stopped responding?Tap to reveal
Answer: Lock the doors
It is the contingency procedure: nobody leaves the room, no calls in or out, and every console operator begins securing their data and handwritten notes for the investigation.
Hard space trivia: accidents and close calls
Ten harder questions, and the round where the answers are worth more than the points. Almost every safety rule in human spaceflight is written in response to something on this list: the inward-opening hatch and pure-oxygen cabin that killed the Apollo 1 crew, the parachute that failed on Soyuz 1, the valve that emptied Soyuz 11's cabin while three men sat in it without pressure suits.
The Bondarenko question is the one that surprises people most, because the story was not public for twenty-five years. He burned to death in a low-pressure chamber flooded with pure oxygen in March 1961, three weeks before Gagarin flew — the first death in cosmonaut training anywhere. It came five months after the Nedelin disaster further down this round, but that one happened on a missile programme rather than a space one. The Soviet Union did not acknowledge it until 1986, and by then NASA had lost the Apollo 1 crew to almost exactly the same hazard.
The X-15 question is a genuine technicality rather than a trick. Michael Adams reached about 81 kilometres, above the 50-mile line the United States used for awarding astronaut wings, but below the 100-kilometre boundary the international federation uses. The same flight is a spaceflight fatality in one country's records and an aircraft accident in the other's.
Q1.Three astronauts died in a fire during a ground test in January 1967. Which mission were they training for?Tap to reveal
Answer: Apollo 1
Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were sealed inside a capsule pressurised with pure oxygen, behind a hatch that opened inward and could not be forced out against the pressure. The redesign that followed is part of why Apollo reached the Moon at all.
Q2.Who was the first person to die during a spaceflight?Tap to reveal
Answer: Vladimir Komarov
Soyuz 1 was in trouble from launch in April 1967. On the way down the main parachute failed to open properly and the capsule struck the ground at high speed. Gagarin was his backup pilot.
Q3.The first cosmonaut to die in training was killed in a pressure chamber in March 1961. What went wrong?Tap to reveal
Answer: A fire in a chamber filled with pure oxygen
Valentin Bondarenko dropped an alcohol-soaked cloth onto an electric hotplate. Materials that barely smoulder in ordinary air burn fiercely in pure oxygen. The Soviet Union did not admit the death until 1986.
Q4.What killed the three cosmonauts of Soyuz 11 in 1971?Tap to reveal
Answer: Their cabin lost its air
A pressure equalisation valve jolted open as the modules separated for re-entry. The crew were not wearing pressure suits, and the recovery team opened an apparently normal capsule to find them dead.
Q5.About ninety people died in a launch pad explosion at Baikonur in October 1960, concealed by the Soviet government until the 1990s. What is the disaster called?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Nedelin catastrophe
The second stage of an R-16 missile ignited while crews worked on the fuelled rocket below it. The Soviet commission counted 92 dead; other published figures run higher, and the true number is still argued over. It is named for Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin, who was on the pad and died with them. The R-16 was an intercontinental missile rather than a space launcher, which is why Valentin Bondarenko is still counted separately as the first death in cosmonaut training.
Q6.What crippled Apollo 13 on its way to the Moon in 1970?Tap to reveal
Answer: An oxygen tank in the service module exploded
The crew used the lunar module as a lifeboat, looped around the Moon and came home. The famous line is slightly misquoted: Jack Swigert actually said, 'Okay, Houston, we've had a problem here.'
Q7.Which Mercury astronaut nearly drowned in 1961 when his capsule sank after splashdown?Tap to reveal
Answer: Gus Grissom
The hatch on Liberty Bell 7 blew early, the capsule filled and went down, and his suit was taking on water as he swam. The capsule itself was raised from nearly three miles of ocean in 1999.
Q8.Why is Michael Adams, killed flying the X-15 rocket plane in 1967, not counted internationally as a spaceflight fatality?Tap to reveal
Answer: His flight passed the American 50-mile boundary but not the 100-kilometre international one
He reached roughly 81 kilometres and was awarded US astronaut wings posthumously. By the international federation's 100-kilometre definition of space, he was still in the atmosphere.
Q9.Two technicians died of nitrogen asphyxiation in 1995 while inspecting the launch pad built for which new European rocket?Tap to reveal
Answer: Ariane 5
The pad was at Kourou in French Guiana, a year before Ariane 5's first test flight. A missing drain plug on a heat exchanger allowed nitrogen to collect where the men were working.
Q10.Something aboard Columbia survived the 2003 break-up and was recovered alive. What was it?Tap to reveal
Answer: Worms
Colonies of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, sealed in small aluminium canisters for a student experiment, were found still living in the debris collected across Texas.
Probes, telescopes and the numbers
Six questions to finish, stepping away from crewed flight. Robotic missions rarely make quiz sets, which is a shame, because their failures are more instructive than most of their successes.
The Mars Climate Orbiter question is the best example anyone has of a unit error with real consequences. A contractor reported thruster performance in pound-force seconds; the navigation software expected newton-seconds. The accumulated difference put the spacecraft on a path far too close to Mars, and after nine months in flight it was gone in minutes. If you only read out one 'why' from this page, read that one.
Q1.Which space telescope was carried into orbit by shuttle mission STS-31 in 1990?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Hubble Space Telescope
Its main mirror had been ground very slightly to the wrong shape, so the first images came back blurred. A shuttle crew fitted corrective optics in 1993 — Hubble had been designed from the start to be serviced in orbit.
Q2.Roughly how many miles are there in a light year?Tap to reveal
Answer: Nearly six trillion
About 5.88 trillion miles, or 9.46 trillion kilometres. Even Proxima Centauri, the nearest star beyond the Sun, is more than four light years away.
Q3.The Galileo spacecraft photographed Earth during a 1990 flyby while on its way to which planet?Tap to reveal
Answer: Jupiter
Galileo took a long looping route, borrowing speed from Venus once and Earth twice, and arrived at Jupiter in 1995. It was named for the astronomer who first saw Jupiter's four large moons in 1610.
Q4.What went wrong with the Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999?Tap to reveal
Answer: Two teams used different units of measurement and the spacecraft was lost
Thruster data was supplied in pound-force seconds while the navigation software expected newton-seconds. The orbiter approached Mars far lower than intended and was destroyed or thrown off into space.
Q5.Which NASA orbiter launched in 2001 to look for signs of water and volcanic activity on Mars?Tap to reveal
Answer: Mars Odyssey
It reached Mars that October, and within months its instruments reported large amounts of hydrogen just under the surface — a strong indication of buried water ice.
Q6.New Horizons launched in January 2006. In which year did it reach Pluto?Tap to reveal
Answer: 2015
The flyby came on 14 July 2015, nine and a half years after launch. Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet a few months after the spacecraft left, so the mission set out for a planet and arrived at something else.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are these space trivia questions suitable for children?
The first round is, and most of the space race round is too. The accidents round is written for adults — it deals plainly with how people died — so skip it for a family table and use the probes round instead.
How long does a 49-question space quiz take to run?
Allow about 45 minutes for the full set with five rounds, reading each question twice and marking between rounds. One round of ten with the answers read out afterwards fits comfortably in ten minutes.
Which of these space trivia questions is the hardest?
Grigori Nelyubov, the cosmonaut dismissed in 1963 and airbrushed out of the photographs, is the one almost nobody gets. The Michael Adams X-15 question is the hardest of the accident round, because the answer turns on two different definitions of where space begins.
Why do older space quizzes get facts wrong?
Because a lot of space trivia is written in the present tense about a moving target. Question sets from the 2000s still describe the Space Shuttle as flying, count Pluto as a planet, and repeat mission plans that were later cancelled. Anything phrased as a record, a first, or a total is worth checking against the date it was written.
Where can I play space trivia online instead of reading it?
Trivio.NET has science and history quiz packs you can play solo or against other people. This page is a reading set rather than a playable one: the questions are written out with the story behind each answer, so you can read a round aloud from the screen.
