144 Fun Facts About NASA

Who signed the law creating NASA?

Dwight Eisenhower signed the act on 29 July 1958; a former general himself, he had asked Congress for a civilian agency rather than hand space to the armed forces.

Who was the first American in space?

Alan Shepard made a 15-minute suborbital hop on 5 May 1961, three weeks after Yuri Gagarin had orbited Earth; an inner-ear disorder then grounded him until surgery let him fly again a decade later.

Which astronaut circled the Moon alone while his two crewmates made the first landing in 1969?

Michael Collins stayed with the command module, losing all radio contact for 48 minutes of every lap behind the Moon; he wrote that what he felt there was not loneliness but something close to exultation.

What famous space telescope was launched in 1990?

The Hubble Space Telescope went up with a mirror ground to the wrong shape, which blurred its first images; astronauts fitted corrective optics on a shuttle repair flight in 1993 and the pictures came back sharp.

Which rocket sent Artemis I on its uncrewed trip around the Moon in November 2022?

The Space Launch System first flew on 16 November 2022, after a faulty sensor reading and a hydrogen leak had scrubbed two attempts and Hurricane Ian had forced the rocket back into its hangar.

Which Soviet satellite's launch in October 1957 shocked the United States into creating NASA?

Sputnik 1 did little more than beep, but the alarm it set off in Washington, remembered as the Sputnik crisis, produced the law that created NASA less than ten months later.

Which space shuttle tragically broke apart during re-entry in 2003?

Columbia was doomed at launch: a piece of insulating foam fell from its fuel tank and damaged the left wing, and the breach let in hot gas when the shuttle came home on 1 February 2003, killing all seven crew.

Which small rover became NASA's first on Mars when it landed in July 1997?

Sojourner rode down with the Mars Pathfinder lander on 4 July 1997 and was built to last a week; it kept working for nearly three months, twelve times as long as planned.

Between them, NASA's two Voyager probes flew past which four planets?

Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune: the outer planets line up this way only about once every 175 years, which let Voyager 2 use each one's gravity to swing on to the next.

Who was the first woman to command a Space Shuttle mission, in 1999?

Eileen Collins took command in July 1999; on her 2005 flight she steered the orbiter through a slow backflip so the station crew could photograph its underside for damage, the first time that had been done.

Who was the first American woman in space?

Sally Ride flew on Challenger in June 1983, twenty years after the Soviet Union sent up the first woman; she later sat on the boards that investigated both shuttle disasters, the only person to serve on both.

NASA's 'Great Observatories' program included which four major space telescopes?

Each covered a different slice of the spectrum, and the four launched between 1990 and 2003.

What does the acronym NASA stand for?

National Aeronautics and Space Administration: the first A is no relic, as NASA still flies experimental aircraft; its X-59 jet, first flown in 2025, is built to go supersonic with a quiet thump in place of the boom.

What was the first satellite successfully launched by the United States?

Explorer 1 went up on an Army rocket on 31 January 1958, weeks after the Navy's Vanguard had blown up on its launch pad; its instruments found the first of the Van Allen radiation belts.

Which mission was the first time a US spacecraft docked in orbit with one from another country?

The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project kept an American and a Soviet craft docked for nearly two days in July 1975; commanders Tom Stafford and Alexei Leonov shook hands between them, and each crew spoke the other's language.

What is the primary observation wavelength for the James Webb Space Telescope?

Infrared light slips through the dust clouds that hide newborn stars and carries the stretched glow of the earliest galaxies; the telescope is named for James Webb, who ran NASA through most of the 1960s.

Which NASA facility in Houston houses Mission Control for human spaceflight?

Johnson Space Center has run every crewed NASA flight from its Mission Control since 1965, which is why astronauts radio 'Houston'; it was renamed in 1973 for Lyndon Johnson, the Texan president who had just died.

Who was the first person to walk on the Moon?

Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon on 20 July 1969 with the words 'one small step for man'; he said he had meant 'for a man', and the missing word cannot be heard on the recording.

Where on the Moon did Apollo 11 touch down in July 1969?

The Sea of Tranquility was picked for being flat and close to the equator; even so, the commander had to take over from the computer and fly past a field of boulders before setting down.

What was the name of the first American space station?

Skylab housed three crews in 1973 and 1974, then fell back to Earth in 1979 and scattered debris over the outback, where the Shire of Esperance sent NASA a 400-dollar fine for littering.

Which Space Shuttle flew the program's final mission in July 2011?

Atlantis landed for the last time on 21 July 2011, ending 30 years of shuttle flights; nearly nine years passed before astronauts again launched into orbit from American soil.

Which NASA craft, landed on Mars in 2012, is known for the selfies it takes with its robotic arm?

Curiosity weighs nearly a tonne, too heavy for the airbags that cushioned earlier rovers, so a rocket-powered 'sky crane' hovered above the ground and lowered it on cables.

Which former V-2 designer led the team that built NASA's Saturn V Moon rocket?

Wernher von Braun surrendered to American troops in 1945 and was brought to the United States with his rocket team; fifteen years later NASA made him chief architect of the rocket that sent Apollo to the Moon.

Which NASA space telescope, launched in 2018, scans the brightest nearby stars for exoplanets?

TESS rode a Falcon 9 into a stretched 13.7-day orbit in April 2018; its wide-field cameras stare at one strip of sky after another, catching the tiny dips in light as planets cross their stars.

Which astronaut, a four-term US senator, flew on the Space Shuttle at the age of 77?

John Glenn represented Ohio from 1974 to 1999 and lobbied NASA for two years to fly again as a test subject for research on ageing; he went up in 1998, 36 years after his first spaceflight.

NASA's New Horizons probe made history in 2015 with the first close flyby of which distant world?

Pluto was still a full planet when New Horizons launched in 2006, and was demoted to dwarf planet before the year was out.

Which university founded and manages NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory?

Caltech students nicknamed the 'Suicide Squad' for their risky rocket tests were moved off campus in the 1930s to a dry canyon, the Arroyo Seco, and the laboratory grew up on the spot.

What kind of animal was Ham, whom NASA launched in a Mercury capsule in January 1961?

A chimpanzee: Ham pulled his levers on cue through a 16-minute flight, showing that useful work could be done in space; he was named for the Holloman Aerospace Medical Center, where he was trained.

NASA's Deep Space Network talks to distant probes from giant dishes in California, Spain and which third country?

Australia hosts the third site, near Canberra; the three are spread around the globe so that, as Earth turns, at least one of them always has a distant spacecraft in view.

Which NASA mission in 1976 was the first to land a working spacecraft on Mars and photograph its surface?

Viking 1 touched down on 20 July 1976 and sent back the first clear pictures from the Martian surface; its lander kept working for more than six years, until a faulty command from Earth cut it off in 1982.

Who was the first African American woman to travel into space?

Mae C. Jemison was a physician who had served as a Peace Corps doctor in Liberia and Sierra Leone; on her 1992 shuttle flight she helped run experiments on bone cells and motion sickness.

What is the crew capsule of NASA's Artemis lunar program?

Orion first flew uncrewed in December 2014 and looped around the Moon on Artemis I in 2022; in April 2026 it carried the four Artemis II astronauts farther from Earth than Apollo 13's crew, the previous record holders.

Which NASA facility in Huntsville, Alabama, is its rocketry and propulsion hub?

Marshall Space Flight Center grew out of the Army's missile team at Huntsville's Redstone Arsenal, which was transferred to NASA in 1960; the work gave the city its nickname, Rocket City.

Who made the first American spacewalk, in 1965?

Ed White floated on a tether for more than 20 minutes, steering with a hand-held gas gun, and called going back inside 'the saddest moment of my life'.

Which NASA probe made the first flyby of Jupiter, in December 1973?

Pioneer 10 was the first craft to fly through the asteroid belt and came out unharmed; it carries a plaque showing a man, a woman and where it came from, a greeting for anyone who ever finds it.

Which NASA spacecraft was the first to reach interstellar space?

Voyager 1 was, despite its name, launched 16 days after Voyager 2; in August 2012 it became the first human-made object to cross into the space between the stars.

Which NASA center on Florida's Atlantic coast has been its main launch site for astronauts since 1968?

Kennedy Space Center sits on Florida's east coast so that rockets fly out over the ocean rather than over towns, and so that they pick up extra speed from Earth's eastward spin.

What was the name of the Apollo 11 lunar module?

Eagle took its name from the bald eagle on the crew's mission patch, which shows the bird coming down on the Moon with an olive branch in its claws; hence the famous call 'The Eagle has landed'.

Which NASA spacecraft became the first to fly through the Sun's outer atmosphere, in 2021?

Parker Solar Probe was the first NASA craft named for a living person: physicist Eugene Parker had predicted the solar wind decades earlier, so the mission sent to sample it close up took his name.

How many astronauts walked on the Moon during the Apollo program?

12 astronauts walked on the Moon, two from each of six landings between 1969 and 1972; it would have been 14 had an explosion on the way out not forced Apollo 13 to turn back without landing.

How did the Space Shuttle orbiter land at the end of a mission?

As an unpowered glider: the orbiter's main engines drew their fuel from the huge external tank, which was dropped before reaching orbit, so it came home with no engine power to land on.

Which California NASA center builds and operates robotic spacecraft and manages the Deep Space Network?

Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) engineers pass round peanuts at every critical moment, a ritual dating from 1964, when someone was eating them as the Ranger 7 Moon probe succeeded after a long run of failures.

What was Project Mercury's main goal?

Project Mercury's goal was to orbit a man and return him safely, ideally before the Soviets; they got there first with Yuri Gagarin in April 1961, and Mercury's own first orbit came ten months later.

What name did the first American to orbit Earth give his Mercury capsule in 1962?

Friendship 7 gave its pilot a scare: a faulty sensor suggested the heat shield had come loose, so he flew through re-entry with the retro-rocket pack still strapped on to hold it in place.

Which region beyond Neptune did New Horizons explore after 2015, flying past Arrokoth in 2019?

The Kuiper Belt is where New Horizons met Arrokoth, a snowman-shaped body whose two lobes merged so gently that it gave scientists their first close look at an untouched building block of the planets.

Who became the first woman to command the International Space Station, leading Expedition 16 in 2007?

Peggy Whitson, an Iowa-born biochemist, became NASA's first female chief astronaut in 2009, and after retiring from the agency she went back to orbit as commander of two private Axiom missions.

Which Apollo 13 crew member was a late replacement after Ken Mattingly was exposed to rubella?

Jack Swigert, the backup command module pilot, replaced Mattingly days before launch; Mattingly never caught rubella and flew to the Moon on Apollo 16, while Swigert radioed 'Houston, we've had a problem'.

Which Apollo 8 astronaut took the famous Earthrise photograph in December 1968?

William Anders shot Earthrise on 24 December 1968 after calling for colour film as Earth rose over the lunar horizon; Life later listed it among its hundred photographs that changed the world.

What filled the Apollo 1 cabin, turning a spark into a fatal fire during a launch rehearsal in January 1967?

Pure oxygen at high pressure let the flames race through the cabin in seconds, killing Grissom, White and Chaffee; crewed Apollo flights stopped for twenty months while the capsule was redesigned.

Which failed part doomed Challenger in January 1986?

A booster O-ring, a rubber seal stiffened by the freezing morning, let flame escape, and the shuttle broke apart 73 seconds into flight; physicist Richard Feynman later showed the flaw by dunking the rubber in ice water.

What was Harrison Schmitt, alone among the Apollo moonwalkers, by profession?

A geologist was what lunar scientists had pressed NASA to send before Apollo ended, and on the final landing Schmitt's crew found orange soil that turned out to be volcanic.

What piece of hardware made its debut on Apollo 15 in 1971?

The Lunar Roving Vehicle was a battery-powered buggy that rode to the Moon folded against the lander's side; it let crews range miles from base, and all three that flew were left parked on the surface.

What did Apollo 14's commander famously hit across the lunar surface in 1971?

Golf balls: the commander had brought a six-iron head that fitted a sample-scoop handle, and joked that his second shot went 'miles and miles'; the footage shows it travelled about 40 yards.

Which aeronautics agency, founded in 1915, was dissolved in 1958 so its staff and labs could become NASA?

NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, began with 12 unpaid members and a $5,000 budget; the wing shapes it catalogued, the NACA airfoils, went on to be used on aircraft around the world.

Which NASA aircraft made the first powered, controlled flight on another planet in 2021?

Ingenuity, a small helicopter that rode to Mars under the Perseverance rover, was built to attempt five test flights; it made 72 over nearly three years before its last one in January 2024.

NASA's Perseverance rover landed in which Martian crater, chosen for its ancient river delta?

Jezero once held a lake fed by a river, and a dried-up delta is the kind of place where traces of ancient life could be preserved; Perseverance landed there in 2021 to collect rock cores for a possible return to Earth.

Christa McAuliffe, who died aboard Challenger in 1986, had been chosen to be the first what in space?

Teacher: McAuliffe was picked from more than 11,000 applicants and planned to give two lessons from orbit; her backup, Barbara Morgan, later became an astronaut herself and flew in 2007.

Which NASA Mars craft's last message, in 2018, was paraphrased as 'My battery is low and it's getting dark'?

Opportunity fell silent on 10 June 2018 when a planet-wide dust storm blotted out its solar panels, after more than 14 years of driving on a mission designed to last 90 days.

NASA's InSight lander reached Mars in 2018 to study the planet's deep interior with what kind of instrument?

A seismometer: the French-built instrument recorded more than 1,300 marsquakes before the lander lost power in 2022, giving scientists a look at the layers inside another planet.

Which NASA spacecraft entered a polar orbit of Jupiter in July 2016?

Juno is named for the goddess who, in Roman myth, could see through the clouds her husband Jupiter hid behind; the probe carries three Lego figurines, of Jupiter, Juno and the astronomer Galileo.

Cassini ended its mission in 2017 by plunging into the atmosphere of which planet?

Cassini dived into Saturn on 15 September 2017 after 13 years in orbit; the 'Grand Finale' dives between the planet and its rings ended with the probe burning up like a meteor.

The ESA-built Huygens probe, carried by NASA's Cassini, landed by parachute on which moon?

Titan's thick atmosphere let Huygens drift down by parachute for about two and a half hours in January 2005; its cameras showed pale hills cut by dark, river-like channels running down to a plain.

Why was the Galileo orbiter deliberately crashed into Jupiter in 2003?

To avoid contaminating Europa: with little fuel left, a derelict Galileo might one day have struck the icy moon and its suspected subsurface ocean, so NASA steered it into Jupiter on 21 September 2003.

NASA's Magellan spacecraft used synthetic-aperture radar to map the surface of which world?

Venus: radar was essential because the planet's thick clouds hide its surface from cameras; between 1990 and 1994 Magellan mapped 98 percent of it.

Which NASA probe orbited the planet Mercury from 2011 to 2015?

MESSENGER's name is a strained acronym chosen to honour Mercury, messenger of the Roman gods; it orbited the planet for four years until its fuel ran out and it crashed into the surface in April 2015.

NASA's Dawn probe orbited the asteroid Vesta and then which dwarf planet, also in the asteroid belt?

Ceres made Dawn the first craft to orbit two different worlds, a feat that depended on ion engines, which thrust gently for years on a small supply of xenon gas.

NASA's OSIRIS-REx dropped a sample capsule into the Utah desert in 2023 after visiting which near-Earth asteroid?

Bennu is a carbonaceous asteroid, and after dropping its capsule the spacecraft was redirected to Apophis for that asteroid's close pass in 2029.

What was NASA's DART testing when it slammed into the space rock Dimorphos in 2022?

Deflecting an asteroid worked better than hoped: the crash shortened Dimorphos's orbit around its parent rock by 32 minutes, when NASA would have counted 73 seconds a success.

Until 1974, NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building held which record?

Tallest building in Florida: the hall stands 526 feet high because whole Moon rockets were stacked upright inside it, and it kept the title until a 535-foot Jacksonville tower passed it in 1974.

What is the top loaded speed of the crawler-transporters that carry NASA rockets to the pad?

About 1 mph when loaded, and only 2 mph empty: the crawl of a few miles from the assembly hall to the launch pad takes many hours.

Which company built the Apollo Lunar Module at its factory in Bethpage, New York?

Grumman's lander became a lifeboat on Apollo 13, keeping the crew alive for the trip home after an explosion crippled their command ship; the company then sent that ship's maker a joke invoice for towing.

Where do NASA astronauts rehearse work outside the space station before they fly?

A giant swimming pool: the Houston tank holds 6.2 million gallons and is 40 feet deep, with station mock-ups under water, and suits weighted to neither sink nor rise mimic the float of orbit.

What nickname do NASA staff use for the agency's red, stylised 1970s logotype?

The 'worm', designed by Richard Danne and Bruce Blackburn in 1974, replaced the 'meatball' insignia until 1992 and was revived on a Falcon 9 for the 2020 Demo-2 launch.

Which aircraft carried Space Shuttle orbiters piggyback across the United States?

A Boeing 747 bought second-hand from American Airlines did the job, with struts fitted to its back; a notice by the mounts read 'attach orbiter here' and added 'black side down'.

Which NASA research center sits at Moffett Federal Airfield in California's Silicon Valley?

Ames Research Center is home to the world's largest wind tunnel, big enough to test full-size aircraft; in 2014 its neighbour Google took a 60-year lease on the adjoining airfield and its giant airship hangar.

What did Apollo crews leave on the Moon that lets scientists measure its distance from Earth to within centimetres?

Laser reflectors left by Apollo 11, 14 and 15 bounce beams fired from Earth straight back; timing the round trip has shown that the Moon is drifting away by about 3.8 centimetres a year.

Which NASA mathematician did an astronaut ask to recheck the computer's figures by hand before his 1962 orbital flight?

Katherine Johnson reran the new electronic computer's orbit figures by hand on a desk calculator; 'If she says they're good, then I'm ready to go,' she recalled Glenn saying, a scene retold in the 2016 film Hidden Figures.

Apollo 14 carried about 500 of what around the Moon, later planted across the United States?

Tree seeds rode in the kit of Stuart Roosa, a former forest-fire smokejumper; the 'Moon trees' grown from them were planted around the country, many for the 1976 Bicentennial.

NASA's first astronauts, the Mercury Seven, were all recruited from which profession?

Military test pilots were judged a large enough field to pick from, and because the work would involve classified matters, drawing on the services settled the security checks too; all seven men went on to fly in space.

What sent Gemini 8 into a violent spin after the first docking in space?

A stuck thruster had the capsule tumbling about once a second before its commander shut the system down and steadied it with the re-entry jets, and mission rules then forced an immediate return to Earth.

What did Apollo 12's crew do to the probe Surveyor 3?

Cut off its camera: they took it home with other parts to see how two and a half years on the Moon had aged them, and by landing within walking distance of the probe they showed a crew could set down on target.

The Mars Climate Orbiter was lost in 1999 because of a mismatch between which two things?

Metric and US customary units: Lockheed Martin's thruster software produced pound-force seconds where NASA's navigators expected newton-seconds, a factor of 4.45 that steered the probe too low on 23 September 1999.

Which two NASA astronauts flew the first crewed SpaceX Crew Dragon mission in 2020?

Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken lifted off on 30 May 2020 with a sequinned toy dinosaur named Tremor, chosen by their families, which floated free in the cabin as the sign that they had reached orbit.

Why did the Apollo 11 crew spend three weeks in isolation after returning from the Moon?

Fear of lunar germs kept the three in a sealed trailer and then a quarantine laboratory for 21 days; President Nixon greeted them through a window, and the precaution was dropped after Apollo 14.

Who stayed on Earth as the comparison subject during Scott Kelly's year aboard the space station?

His identical twin Mark, also an astronaut, was the control for NASA's Twins Study; the surprise was that the protective caps on Scott's chromosomes, his telomeres, grew longer while he was in orbit.

Which astronaut took part in the first all-female spacewalk with Jessica Meir in October 2019?

Christina Koch's first all-female outing, planned with Anne McClain that March, was called off because the station lacked spacesuits in the right size; in 2026 she flew around the Moon on Artemis II.

What did flight director Gene Kranz famously wear in Mission Control, a new one each mission?

A vest: Gene Kranz's wife, Marta, made him a new one in a different style for every mission he led as flight director, and he wore each at his console in Mission Control.

The 'Pale Blue Dot' photo of Earth was taken in 1990 from roughly how far away?

About 6 billion km: Carl Sagan spent years urging NASA to turn a departing probe's camera back for one last look, and in the picture taken in February 1990 Earth is a speck less than a pixel across.

A fan letter campaign got the first Space Shuttle orbiter renamed after which fictional ship?

USS Enterprise: Star Trek fans wrote to the White House and the orbiter originally to be called Constitution was rolled out as Enterprise in September 1976, with the show's cast on hand; it never flew in space.

Which Apollo veteran commanded the first Space Shuttle flight, STS-1, in 1981?

John Young had already flown to the Moon twice; on STS-1 he and Robert Crippen rode a brand-new vehicle on its very first launch, the first time NASA had put a crew aboard without an uncrewed trial.

Which Space Shuttle orbiter was built to replace the one destroyed in 1986?

Endeavour was named by schoolchildren in a national competition after Captain Cook's ship, which is why it has the British spelling; to save money it was assembled largely from spare parts.

Which Apollo astronaut's mother had the maiden name Moon?

Buzz Aldrin's mother was born Marion Moon; Aldrin also took communion privately inside the lunar module shortly after the Apollo 11 landing.

Why did Gus Grissom's Mercury capsule sink in 1961?

Its hatch blew early, letting the sea pour in, and Grissom nearly drowned before a helicopter reached him; the capsule lay on the Atlantic floor for 38 years until it was raised in 1999.

Which rock and roll song is on the Voyager Golden Record?

Johnny B. Goode by Chuck Berry is the record's only rock and roll track; when a colleague dismissed the music as adolescent, Carl Sagan pointed out that Earth has plenty of adolescents.

NASA's Apollo spacesuits were made by a division of which company, best known for women's underwear?

Playtex was the consumer name of the International Latex Corporation, whose industrial division won the suit contract with its flexible joints and dressed all twelve moonwalkers.

Which contraband snack did an astronaut smuggle aboard NASA's Gemini 3 in a spacesuit pocket?

A corned beef sandwich came out of the pilot's pocket mid-flight, and both crewmen took a few bites before stowing it. Its floating crumbs could have fouled the electronics, so they were reprimanded.

What name did NASA give the chimpanzee who rode a Mercury capsule on a suborbital flight in 1961?

Ham was an acronym for the Holloman Aerospace Medical Center that prepared him for the flight. Until he came back safely he was officially just No. 65.

What colour was the Space Shuttle's external tank after NASA stopped painting it white?

Orange is simply the colour of the tank's sprayed-on insulation. Leaving it unpainted from the third flight onward saved about 600 pounds of weight.

Which actress, famous as Lieutenant Uhura, helped NASA recruit women and minority astronauts?

Nichelle Nichols volunteered after her television series was cancelled, and her recruits included Charles Bolden, who went on to run the whole agency.

Which precious metal coats the mirrors of NASA's largest space telescope, launched on Christmas Day 2021?

Gold coats each of the 18 hexagonal segments and is itself covered by a thin layer of glass for durability. The mirrors underneath are made of beryllium.

Apollo 10's command module was Charlie Brown; which comic-strip character named its lunar module?

Snoopy the lander swooped to about nine miles above the lunar surface without touching down. The beagle and his owner became the crew's semi-official mascots.

Which country built the Space Shuttle's robotic arm, first flown on NASA's second shuttle mission?

Canada agreed in 1975 to develop and build the arm, named the Canadarm. It went on to fly on more than 90 missions, across all five orbiters.

Which US president signed the law that created NASA, months after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik?

Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the act on July 29, setting up a civilian agency. The law kept its work separate from the military's own space programs.

Which part failed in freezing weather on launch morning, dooming NASA's shuttle Challenger in 1986?

An O-ring seal made of rubber had been stiffened by record cold. Physicist Richard Feynman later showed the effect at a televised hearing with a glass of cold water.

At which Texas university did President Kennedy give his 1962 speech about choosing to go to the Moon?

Rice University's stadium held a crowd of about 40,000 for the speech on a warm, sunny September day. Much of the text was written by Kennedy's adviser Ted Sorensen.

Which powdered fruit drink, often wrongly credited to NASA, flew on Mercury and Gemini missions?

Tang was formulated by General Foods in 1957 and sold poorly until it went into orbit in 1962. That fame created the myth that it was invented for astronauts.

Which mattress material was developed under a NASA contract in 1966 to make aircraft seats safer?

Memory foam stayed hard to manufacture even after NASA released it to the public domain in the early 1980s, so only a few companies were willing to work with it at first.

Which Swiss watchmaker's Speedmaster was the first watch worn by an astronaut walking on the Moon?

Omega's chronograph passed every one of NASA's laboratory tests and showed the best reliability. A rival's entry failed mainly on the humidity test.

Which New Hampshire teacher, chosen for NASA's Teacher in Space Project, died aboard Challenger?

Christa McAuliffe was selected from more than 11,000 applicants. Her backup, a fellow teacher, later became a professional astronaut and finally flew to orbit in 2007.

Which astronaut commanded NASA's Apollo 13 and was later played by Tom Hanks on film?

Jim Lovell appears in the 1995 film himself, in a cameo as captain of the recovery ship. He also co-wrote Lost Moon, the book the film was based on.

Which commander was the last Apollo astronaut to walk on the Moon, leaving the surface in December 1972?

Gene Cernan wrote his daughter's initials in the lunar dust before he left. A popular version of the story wrongly has him writing them on a rock.

Apollo 11 touched down on which dark lunar plain, a name its astronauts borrowed for their landing base?

The Sea of Tranquility lent its name to Tranquility Base, a call sign the two moonwalkers never used in training. It was announced about 18 seconds after touchdown.

On Apollo 15, David Scott dropped a hammer and which other object together to prove Galileo right?

A feather from a falcon, carried to honour the crew's Air Force service, hit the ground at the same moment as the hammer because the Moon has almost no air to slow it.

What struck NASA's Apollo 12 rocket twice within a minute of liftoff, knocking instruments offline?

Lightning was triggered by the climbing rocket itself on a rainy launch day. The strikes caused instrument problems but no serious permanent damage, and the crew flew on to the Moon.

What was the name of Apollo 13's lunar module, used by the astronauts as a lifeboat on the way home?

Aquarius had charged batteries and full oxygen tanks meant for the lunar surface, so Mission Control had the astronauts power it up when the command module had to be shut down.

Who became the first African American in space, flying aboard NASA's shuttle Challenger in 1983?

Guion Bluford rode the first shuttle mission to launch and land at night. He went back to space three more times, the last in 1992.

Which MIT programmer led the team that wrote the onboard flight software for NASA's Apollo missions?

Margaret Hamilton began calling the work software engineering at a time when writing code was not taken as seriously as other engineering disciplines.

Who became NASA's first Black female engineer and was played by Janelle Monáe in Hidden Figures?

Mary Jackson had to petition the City of Hampton for permission to attend the engineering classes she needed, because they were held at an all-white high school.

NASA's headquarters stands on a street renamed Hidden Figures Way in 2019; in which city is it?

Washington, D.C. is home to the agency's leadership, at 300 E Street SW. The honorary street name salutes the Black women mathematicians of NASA's early years.

Which 'lucky' snack do staff at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory eat before launches and landings?

Peanuts were first passed round to ease the tension before Ranger 7, which succeeded after a string of failed Moon probes. Staff joked they were a good luck charm and the habit stuck.

Which camera maker supplied the cameras that NASA's Apollo astronauts used, and left, on the Moon?

Hasselblad cameras are still up there. The final landing crew left two behind, joining ten others abandoned by earlier missions.

Which US president's signature appears on the plaque that Apollo 11 left on the Moon?

Richard Nixon signed the first and last of the stainless steel plaques. Each was fixed to the ladder of a lander's descent stage, the part that stays behind on the surface.

Which country's space agency built the International Space Station's largest single module, a lab named after hope?

Japan's agency JAXA developed the science module, Kibo, whose name is the Japanese word for hope. An outdoor platform nicknamed the Terrace holds experiments exposed to open space.

Which author's 1979 book The Right Stuff told the story of NASA's Mercury Seven astronauts?

Tom Wolfe first planned a complete history of the space program. He stopped after the Mercury flights because he felt he had already captured the astronauts' ethos.

Which Mercury Seven astronaut was grounded by an irregular heartbeat and did not reach space until 1975?

Deke Slayton spent his grounded years running the astronaut office, where he decided who flew each mission. Doctors finally cleared him to fly in 1972.

Which Broadway musical heroine gave NASA's Gemini 3 capsule its nickname, a joke about a sunken Mercury craft?

Molly Brown, as in The Unsinkable Molly Brown, was Gus Grissom's playful pick after his first capsule sank on splashdown. It stayed an unofficial nickname.

Which NASA astronaut spent about six months aboard Russia's Mir in 1996, then a record for any woman?

Shannon Lucid was not meant to stay so long: her return was delayed twice, adding about six weeks. She still walked off the shuttle after nearly 400 hours on Mir's exercise machines.

Which engineer came up with the idea of a mission control center and became NASA's first flight director?

Chris Kraft shaped the organisation and culture of Mission Control as well as inventing it. The Houston building that houses it was later named after him.

Which aircraft carrier recovered NASA's Apollo 11 crew and capsule from the Pacific after splashdown?

USS Hornet picked up the next Moon crew as well, four months later. The carrier is now a museum ship in Alameda, California.

NASA quarantined returning Apollo crews in a converted travel trailer made by which American brand?

Airstream trailers were kept at lower pressure inside, with any vented air filtered. NASA dropped the quarantine after Apollo 14, once the Moon had been shown to be sterile.

NASA's New Horizons probe carries about an ounce of the ashes of which astronomer, who found its main target?

Clyde Tombaugh made his famous discovery in 1930 and died in 1997 at the age of 90, nine years before the probe carrying his ashes left Earth.

Which company built Starliner, the capsule that flew two NASA astronauts to the space station in June 2024?

Boeing saw its capsule sent home uncrewed that September after thrusters malfunctioned on approach. Its two astronauts stayed in orbit and came back in March 2025 aboard a SpaceX Dragon.

From which part of South America did NASA's largest space telescope lift off on an Ariane 5 rocket?

French Guiana is home to Europe's spaceport near Kourou. The European Space Agency supplied the rocket as part of its contribution, in exchange for a share of observing time.

Which rock and roll singer's song Johnny B. Goode travels on NASA's Voyager Golden Record?

Chuck Berry's hit is one of 27 pieces of music on the disc, chosen as an introduction to humanity for any alien listeners. Both Voyager craft, launched in 1977, carry a copy.

Which astronaut made the first untethered spacewalk in 1984, flying free of the shuttle on a jet backpack?

Bruce McCandless was already a familiar voice: fifteen years earlier he had been the capsule communicator in Mission Control talking to the first moonwalkers.

Which NASA spacecraft flew through the coma of comet Wild 2 and returned samples to Earth in 2006?

Stardust caught its grains in aerogel, a solid with one thousandth the density of glass. The blocks sat in a collector tray about the size of a tennis racket.

On which asteroid did NASA's NEAR Shoemaker make a slow, controlled touchdown in February 2001?

Eros kept its visitor busy after the landing: a gamma-ray instrument went on collecting data about four inches from the ground, ten times more sensitive than it had been in orbit.

Which NASA lander dug into Martian arctic soil in 2008 and confirmed water ice just below the surface?

Phoenix watched dice-sized bright clumps in its trench vanish over four days, a strong sign that they were ice turning straight into vapour once exposed.

Which satellite program, begun by NASA in 1972, is the longest-running source of imagery of Earth?

Landsat started life under a plainer name: its first craft went up in July 1972 as the Earth Resources Technology Satellite. The pictures have continued without a break since.

In which two-seat jet trainer did shuttle-era NASA astronauts traditionally arrive at the launch site?

T-38 Talon flying carried real risk for the astronaut corps. In 1966 Elliot See and Charles Bassett were killed when their jet struck a building in fog.

Which rocket plane, flown by NASA and the Air Force from under a B-52's wing, set a speed record in 1967?

The X-15 reached 4,520 miles per hour, about Mach 6.7, with Pete Knight at the controls. That is the official record for a crewed, powered aircraft.

Which NASA administrator, appointed in 2021, had flown on a Space Shuttle as a congressman in 1986?

Bill Nelson flew as a payload specialist and was only the second sitting member of Congress in space, after Senator Jake Garn. He later spent 18 years as a senator for Florida.

The word astronaut, popularised by NASA's space program, comes from Greek words meaning what?

Star sailor is the literal sense, from astron and nautes. The word turned up in speculative writing decades before anyone could actually be one.

Who was the first American woman to spacewalk and, in 2020, the first woman to reach the ocean's deepest point?

Kathryn Sullivan rode a submersible to the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench. That made her the first person to travel both into space and to the deepest known point of the oceans.