Artemis Program
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50 free Artemis Program trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Artemis is NASA's effort to put people back on the Moon for the first time since Apollo 17, built from Shuttle engines, a capsule rescued from the cancelled Constellation program and landers bought from private companies. Artemis I sent an uncrewed Orion around the Moon in 2022 with a mannequin named Moonikin Campos in the commander's seat; Artemis II carried four astronauts on a lunar flyby in April 2026 and broke Apollo 13's distance record. These 50 questions cover the hardware, the missions and the politics. The Space Launch System and its four RS-25 engines, Orion's European Service Module, the distant retrograde orbit, Snoopy as zero-g indicator, the heat-shield erosion that reshaped Artemis II's reentry, the crew of Integrity, the Starship and Blue Moon landers, the Artemis Accords and the Gateway station that was paused in 2026. Easy questions stick to the goddess, the rocket and the crew; the expert tier asks about contract values, the HALO module's builder and the Centaur V upper stage. Every answer is cited to a page we checked.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01From which NASA center do the Artemis program's Moon rockets lift off?
Kennedy Space Center
Kennedy Space Center in Florida: each rocket rides to the pad at about one mile an hour on a tracked carrier built in the 1960s to haul Saturn V Moon rockets.
Q 02Artemis, the Moon program's namesake, is best known in Greek myth as the goddess of what?
The hunt
The hunt and wild animals were her domain. NASA picked her because she is the twin sister of Apollo, and the new program set out to land the first woman on the Moon.
Q 03Which president signed Space Policy Directive 1, the order that sent NASA back toward the Moon?
Donald Trump
Donald Trump signed it in December 2017, scrapping NASA's plan to send astronauts to an asteroid and ordering a return to the Moon first, with Mars to follow.
Q 04Which NASA administrator announced the Artemis name in May 2019?
Jim Bridenstine
Jim Bridenstine revealed the name on a call about an extra $1.6 billion for a 2024 landing, saying it suited a program that would carry the first woman to the Moon.
Q 05Which cancelled NASA program was Artemis's Orion spacecraft originally designed for?
Constellation
Constellation was cancelled in 2010 after a review found it could not reach the Moon without far more money. Congress kept its Orion capsule and ordered a new rocket to carry it.
Q 06Which hurricane sent the Artemis I rocket back to shelter days before a planned launch?
Hurricane Ian
Hurricane Ian forced the rollback in late September 2022. Six weeks later NASA left the rocket on the pad through Hurricane Nicole, and it launched within a week of that storm.
Q 07SLS's RS-25 engines first flew on which vehicle?
Space Shuttle
The Space Shuttle: the first SLS rockets use engines that really flew on shuttle missions. They were built to be reused, but each now makes one last flight and is thrown away with the stage.
Q 08Which company builds the SLS core stage?
Boeing
Boeing builds the 212-foot stage, the largest NASA has ever produced, and each one makes a 900-mile trip to the launch site by barge.
Q 09At which NASA site in New Orleans is the SLS core stage built?
Michoud Assembly Facility
Michoud Assembly Facility came through Hurricane Katrina with the help of 38 workers who stayed behind to run its pumps, clearing more than a billion gallons of water from the rocket factory.
Q 10Which company builds Orion's crew module?
Lockheed Martin
Lockheed Martin won the contract in 2006, when NASA gave up on winged spaceplanes and went back to the capsule shape that first carried Americans into orbit.
Q 11Who is the prime contractor for Orion's European Service Module?
Airbus Defence and Space
Airbus Defence and Space assembles it in Bremen, Germany. Europe supplies the module in place of cash for its share of the International Space Station's running costs.
Q 12Orion's first uncrewed test flight in 2014 launched atop which rocket?
Delta IV Heavy
Delta IV Heavy flung the empty capsule 3,600 miles up so that it would fall back at about 20,000 mph, fast enough to give its new heat shield a first real test.
Q 13A leak of which propellant scrubbed Artemis I's second launch attempt?
Liquid hydrogen
Q 21The Artemis II crew sent greetings from space for which holiday?
Easter
Easter fell four days into the flight. The launch had slipped from February to April 1 after a fuel leak in rehearsal and then a helium fault that sent the rocket back to its hangar.
Q 22Who commanded Artemis II?
Reid Wiseman
Reid Wiseman led the crew. As they rounded the Moon, the four proposed naming a crater Carroll, after his late wife, who died of cancer in 2020.
Q 23Which Artemis II crew member was the first woman to travel around the Moon?
Christina Koch
Christina Koch was due to make the first all-female spacewalk in March 2019, but the station had only one medium suit ready. She made it that October with Jessica Meir.
Liquid hydrogen slips through the tightest seals. On the night Artemis I finally launched, three technicians walked up to the fuelled rocket and tightened loose nuts to stop another leak.
Q 14Which orbit did Orion fly for six days on Artemis I?
Distant retrograde orbit
Distant retrograde orbit: distant because it sits far above the Moon, retrograde because Orion circled against the Moon's own motion. It is so stable that the ship needed little fuel to stay.
Q 15What did NASA name the mannequin that flew in the commander's seat on Artemis I?
Moonikin Campos
Moonikin Campos won a public vote of more than 300,000 ballots. The name honours Arturo Campos, the engineer whose emergency power plan helped bring a crippled 1970 Moon flight home.
Q 16Which cartoon character flew on Artemis I as the zero-g indicator?
Snoopy
Snoopy has been NASA's safety mascot since the Apollo era, and astronauts still hand silver Snoopy pins to workers who help keep crews safe.
Q 17The phantom torsos Helga and Zohar on Artemis I measured what?
Radiation exposure
Radiation exposure was mapped inside both torsos. Zohar wore a protective vest and Helga flew without one, so scientists could see how much the vest helped.
Q 18Which voice assistant was tested aboard Artemis I in the Callisto demonstration?
Amazon Alexa
Amazon Alexa flew with no crew to talk to, so staff in mission control spoke to it over a video link. It answered from a database on board, because the cloud was too far away.
Q 19Artemis I splashed down 50 years to the day after which 1972 Moon landing?
Apollo 17
Apollo 17 landed on December 11, 1972. Fifty years later to the day, Orion skipped off the top of the atmosphere like a stone across a lake before its final plunge into the Pacific.
Q 20What problem did engineers find in Orion's heat shield after Artemis I?
Greater-than-expected erosion
Greater-than-expected erosion: trapped gas broke chunks of charred material off the shield. NASA flew the same shield design on Artemis II but steepened the reentry to cut the time spent in the conditions that caused it.
Q 24Which country did Artemis II mission specialist Jeremy Hansen represent?
Canada
Canada won the seat by agreeing to build Canadarm3, a robotic arm for NASA's planned station near the Moon. It made Hansen the first non-American to fly around the Moon.
Q 25What name did the Artemis II crew give their Orion spacecraft?
Integrity
Integrity was the crew's own choice. They said it stood for the trust, respect, candour and humility shared by the astronauts and the thousands of people who got them to the Moon.
Q 26Whose distance record from Earth did the Artemis II crew break?
Apollo 13
Apollo 13 set the old mark by accident: after its oxygen tank blew, the emergency loop home carried the crew higher over the far side than any landing flight. Orion went about 4,100 miles farther.
Q 27What kind of path did Artemis II fly around the Moon?
Free-return trajectory
A free-return trajectory lets gravity do the work: once Orion swung behind the Moon, Earth pulled it home, so the crew would have got back even if the main engine had failed.
Q 28What did the Artemis II crew observe shortly after their lunar flyby?
A solar eclipse
A solar eclipse: the Moon hid the Sun for the best part of an hour, far longer than totality ever lasts on Earth, and the crew watched the corona glow as a halo around a black disc.
Q 29Which service's divers helped the Artemis II crew out after splashdown?
US Navy
The US Navy sent the transport ship USS John P. Murtha. Apollo capsules were hoisted aboard by crane, but the bigger, heavier Orion was floated into the ship's well deck.
Q 30Rise, the Artemis II mascot an eight-year-old designed, shows the Moon wearing what as a cap?
Earth
Earth: Lucas Ye of California beat more than 2,600 contest entries with a smiling Moon in an Earth cap, and NASA's thermal-blanket lab stitched it for the flight.