Apollo 11 Trivia
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108 free Apollo 11 trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Apollo 11 put the first humans on the Moon on 20 July 1969, and this quiz walks through the mission hour by hour. It starts before launch: how the crew came together, why Collins designed a patch with no names, why the modules were called Columbia and Eagle, and the argument over who would step out first. Then comes the flight itself: the Saturn V lifting off before a million spectators, the 1201 and 1202 alarms, the boulder field Armstrong flew past, the fuel left in the tank, and Charlie Duke breathing again in Houston. The moonwalk gets its due, from the first step and the missing 'a' to Aldrin's communion, the flag that fell over on liftoff, the plaque, the retroreflector that still works, the silicon disc of goodwill messages and the felt-tip pen that armed the ascent engine. Then the return: Luna 15 crashing while they were still on the surface, splashdown near USS Hornet, three weeks in quarantine, ticker-tape parades for six million people and the Giant Leap world tour. The final stretch covers the men themselves: Armstrong the civilian test pilot, Aldrin the MiG killer with a doctorate, and Collins, born in Rome, who later ran the National Air and Space Museum. Easy questions suit anyone who knows the famous line; the expert tier is for spaceflight obsessives. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the mission and its crew, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question. Our separate Apollo program and Apollo 13 quizzes cover the rest of the story.
30 of 108 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01On what date did Apollo 11's lunar module land on the Moon?
July 20, 1969
July 20, 1969. The touchdown came eight years after President Kennedy asked Congress for a Moon landing before the decade was out, and it beat his deadline by just over five months.
Q 02While Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the Moon, where was Apollo 11's third astronaut, Michael Collins?
Orbiting the Moon alone
Orbiting the Moon alone. Collins kept Columbia circling for more than a day and hunted for the lander through his sextant on pass after pass, but never managed to spot it.
Q 03What was the call sign of the Apollo 11 lunar module?
Eagle
Eagle. Its ascent stage was cut loose in lunar orbit once the crew were back aboard Columbia, and a 2021 study found it may still be circling up there instead of having crashed.
Q 04Apollo 11's command module name, Columbia, was a nod to the Columbiad, a giant cannon in which author's novel?
Jules Verne
Jules Verne. His 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon fires three men moonward from the Columbiad, a giant cannon sunk into the ground in Florida, a century before the real crew left from the same state.
Q 05Which flight director was on console for Apollo 11's lunar landing?
Gene Kranz
Gene Kranz. With the radio link fading in and out, he polled his White Team one controller at a time and judged he had just enough data to tell the crew they were 'Go' for powered descent.
Q 06What does the bird on the Apollo 11 mission patch carry in its talons?
An olive branch
An olive branch is clutched in the talons; it was first drawn in the beak and moved after Bob Gilruth felt the open talons looked too warlike.
Q 07Which former president watched Apollo 11 lift off from the VIP stands?
Lyndon B. Johnson
Lyndon B. Johnson. As vice president in 1961 he had advised Kennedy that a Moon landing was a race America could win; he watched it leave along with about a million people on the nearby beaches.
Q 08Which Soviet probe launched three days before Apollo 11 in a bid to return lunar samples first?
Luna 15
Luna 15 crashed into Mare Crisium about two hours before Armstrong and Aldrin lifted off from the surface, while astronomers at Britain's Jodrell Bank listened in: 'it's going down much too fast'.
Q 09In which lunar 'sea' did the Apollo 11 lunar module land?
Sea of Tranquility
Sea of Tranquility. Robot scouts had been there first: Ranger 8 photographed the plain as it crashed into it and Surveyor 5 soft-landed on it, showing ground flat and smooth enough for a crew.
Q 10The 1202 alarms during Apollo 11's descent meant the guidance computer was struggling with what?
Too many tasks at once
Too many tasks at once. Stray radar signals were eating its processing time, so the software dropped its low-priority jobs and kept the vital ones running, which let the landing go ahead.
Q 11Which MIT computer scientist led the team that wrote the flight software for Apollo 11's guidance computer?
Margaret Hamilton
Margaret Hamilton. Her team had built in routines to recover from errors, so when alarms hit during the descent the software kept the landing going instead of forcing an abort; she later popularised the term 'software engineering'.
Q 12Why did Armstrong take manual control late in Apollo 11's descent?
Boulders ahead
Boulders ahead. The autopilot was steering for a crater the size of a football field, strewn with big rocks, so Armstrong flew on past it to smoother ground.
Q 13Houston's 'sixty seconds' call during Apollo 11's landing counted down what?
Fuel left
Q 21What made Apollo 11's flag appear to fly on the airless Moon?
A crossbar along the top
A crossbar along the top. The astronauts could not pull the telescoping rod all the way out, which is why the flag looks rippled, as if caught in a breeze.
Q 22What happened to Apollo 11's American flag when the lunar module's ascent stage lifted off?
It toppled over
It toppled over: Aldrin glimpsed it falling in the ascent-engine exhaust, and later crews planted their flags farther from the lunar module.
Q 23From where did Nixon make his 'most historic phone call' to the astronauts on the Moon?
The White House
Fuel left. The calls ran down to a 'bingo' point where the crew had to land within 20 seconds or abort; they touched down with about 25 seconds in hand by Houston's count, and later analysis roughly doubled that.
Q 14After Apollo 11 touched down, CAPCOM Charlie Duke said a bunch of guys were about to what?
Turn blue
Turn blue. 'We're breathing again,' Duke added; in 1972 he landed on the Moon himself with Apollo 16 and, at 36, became the youngest person to walk on it.
Q 15What reason is usually given for Armstrong leaving Apollo 11's lander ahead of Aldrin?
Where the LM hatch was
Where the LM hatch was: it hinged on Aldrin's side and opened inward, leaving the commander nearest the exit; Chris Kraft later revealed managers had met to ensure Armstrong went first.
Q 16After landing, Apollo 11's crew asked to skip which part of the flight plan?
A rest period
A rest period. With the lander checked out, they asked to go straight outside, Houston agreed, and Armstrong was on the surface about six and a half hours after touchdown.
Q 17Armstrong's first words on the Moon are often printed with which bracketed word he meant to say?
A
The bracketed word is 'A': Armstrong meant to say 'one small step for a man', which is what makes sense of the line, but no recording clearly carries it.
Q 18How did Buzz Aldrin describe the Moon as he stepped out?
Magnificent desolation
Magnificent desolation. Aldrin came down the ladder about nineteen minutes after Armstrong, and forty years on he used the phrase as the title of a memoir about his depression and drinking after the flight.
Q 19Apollo 11's moonwalk was broadcast live to an estimated audience of about how many people?
600 million
600 million is the usual estimate, about a fifth of humanity, though NASA has also put it at 650 million. The first steps reached them through a tracking dish near Canberra, whose picture was clearer than California's.
Q 20How did Buzz Aldrin privately mark the Moon landing before he and Armstrong stepped outside?
He took Communion
He took Communion. Aldrin, a Presbyterian elder, sipped wine from a chalice his church had given him, and kept it off the air because an atheist campaigner's challenge to Apollo 8's reading from Genesis had left NASA wary.
The White House: Nixon spoke from the Oval Office by a radio-telephone link relayed through Houston, after Frank Borman had persuaded him to drop a long prepared speech.
Q 24The plaque on Apollo 11's lander ends with which sentence?
We came in peace for all mankind
'We came in peace for all mankind' echoes the 1958 law that created NASA, which pledged America's space activity to 'peaceful purposes for the benefit of all mankind'.
Q 25Apollo 11's rocks held a mineral, armalcolite, named after what?
The three astronauts
The three astronauts: ARMstrong, ALdrin and COLlins. It was one of three minerals in their rocks that were thought to exist only on the Moon, and all three have since turned up on Earth.
Q 26Which Apollo 11 surface experiment remained in scientific use for more than 50 years?
The retroreflector array
The retroreflector array. It needs no power, just 100 small mirrors that bounce laser pulses straight back to Earth, and decades of timing them showed the Moon drifting away about as fast as fingernails grow.
Q 27Apollo 11 left a tiny silicon disc on the Moon carrying messages from whom?
World leaders
World leaders. Presidents, prime ministers and monarchs of 73 countries sent goodwill notes, etched too small to read by eye; the disc was still in Aldrin's sleeve pocket as the moonwalk ended, until Armstrong reminded him.
Q 28Armstrong and Aldrin left memorial items on the Moon, including a mission patch honouring which flight's crew?
Apollo 1
Apollo 1's patch, honouring Grissom, White and Chaffee, went into a bag with medals for cosmonauts Gagarin and Komarov, which Aldrin tossed from his sleeve pocket at the end of the moonwalk.
Q 29What did Apollo 11's moonwalkers use to push in a broken circuit breaker so their ascent engine could fire?
A felt-tip pen
A felt-tip pen, a Duro marker with a nonconductive tip, pushed the broken engine-arm breaker back in and let the ascent engine fire to get them off the Moon.
Q 30Which aircraft carrier recovered the Apollo 11 crew after splashdown in the Pacific?
USS Hornet
USS Hornet, with President Nixon aboard to greet them, picked up the crew after a storm in the target area forced the splashdown point to be moved about 250 miles.