Astronauts
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50 free Astronauts trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Fewer than 800 people have ever crossed the 100-kilometre Kármán line, and this quiz is about them. It starts with Yuri Gagarin's 108-minute orbit and Valentina Tereshkova's solo flight, moves through Alexei Leonov's first spacewalk and the Mercury Seven, and ends with the record-holders of the space-station era: Valeri Polyakov's 437 days aboard Mir, Peggy Whitson's 695 cumulative days and Oleg Kononenko's 1,100. Along the way there are firsts from every direction — Sally Ride, Guion Bluford, Mae Jemison, Eileen Collins, Yang Liwei, Helen Sharman and Rakesh Sharma — plus the oddities: the cosmonaut stranded in orbit while his country dissolved, the marathon run on a treadmill in space, the twin study, the self-funded tourist who paid $20 million, and the eight-day Starliner test that lasted nine months. Easy questions stick to Gagarin, Shepard and Glenn; the expert tier asks about X-15 pilots, Project Juno and the first non-American, non-Russian ISS commander. Every answer is cited to a page we checked.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01From which language do the roots of the word 'astronaut' ('star sailor') come?
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek. The parts are astron, 'star', and nautes, 'sailor', and the word was already in print in science fiction around 1930, three decades before anyone flew.
Q 02What informal term is used for space travellers from China's program?
Taikonaut
Taikonaut. The word bolts taikong, Chinese for space, onto the ending of astronaut, and was in use online by 1998, five years before China sent anyone into orbit.
Q 03At what altitude does the FAI's Kármán line, the boundary of space, sit?
100 km
100 km. The line is a convention, not a physical edge: the United States gives out astronaut wings from 50 miles up, about 80 km, so tallies of who has been to space differ.
Q 04By early 2026, roughly how many people had ever flown in space?
About 700
About 700. Counts run from roughly 650 to 780, depending on whether passengers on brief suborbital tourist hops are counted as space travellers.
Q 05In 1963 Joseph Walker became the first person to reach space twice, flying which rocket plane?
X-15
X-15. Dropped from beneath a B-52 bomber, it took Walker past the international edge of space twice in five weeks, the only one of its pilots ever to get that high.
Q 06Who was the first person to journey into outer space?
Yuri Gagarin
Yuri Gagarin. He did not land in his capsule: as planned, he ejected some 7 km above the ground and came down under his own parachute.
Q 07Which spacecraft carried the first man in space in April 1961?
Vostok 1
Vostok 1. It flew on automatic with the pilot's manual controls locked, and the code to free them was sealed in an envelope on board in case of emergency.
Q 08Who was the first woman in space?
Valentina Tereshkova
Valentina Tereshkova. She circled the Earth 48 times in 1963, and it was 19 years before another woman followed her into space.
Q 09What job did the first woman in space hold before being chosen as a cosmonaut?
Textile factory worker
Textile factory worker. What got her picked was her hobby: she was a keen amateur parachutist, and the first cosmonauts had to eject and land by parachute, apart from their capsules.
Q 10Who performed the first spacewalk, in March 1965?
Alexei Leonov
Alexei Leonov. His suit swelled and stiffened so much in the vacuum that he had to let air out of it to squeeze back into the airlock.
Q 11Who was the first American in space?
Alan Shepard
Alan Shepard. His Freedom 7 flight was a 15-minute hop that never reached orbit, made just over three weeks after the Soviets had sent a man right round the Earth.
Q 12What did the Apollo 14 commander famously do on the Moon?
Hit golf balls
Hit golf balls. He had brought a six-iron head that fitted onto a sampling tool, and swung one-handed because his suit was too stiff for anything else.
Q 13Who was the first American to orbit the Earth?
John Glenn
John Glenn. A warning signal suggested his heat shield had come loose, so he flew re-entry with the retro-rocket pack still strapped on in the hope it would hold the shield in place.
Q 21Who was the first African-American woman in space, aboard Endeavour in 1992?
Mae Jemison
Mae Jemison. She resigned from NASA within six months of the flight to start her own technology company, and later led a project on travel to other stars.
Q 22Which Star Trek character inspired the first African-American woman in space?
Lieutenant Uhura
Lieutenant Uhura. In 1993 she joined the franchise herself, with a cameo in The Next Generation that made her the first real astronaut to appear in Star Trek.
Q 23The first African-American woman in space served as a Peace Corps doctor in Sierra Leone and which neighbouring country?
Liberia
Q 14The first American to orbit the Earth flew again in 1998 while holding which job?
US senator
US senator. Aged 77 and in his final months representing Ohio, he flew as a test subject for NASA's research into how weightlessness relates to ageing.
Q 15How many astronauts made up NASA's original Mercury group announced in 1959?
Seven
Seven. They were all that was left of 110 military test pilots who made NASA's first cut, 32 of whom went on to weeks of gruelling medical and psychological examinations.
Q 16Which Mercury astronaut was the only one to fly Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions?
Wally Schirra
Wally Schirra. On his Gemini flight, days before Christmas, he reported a UFO to Mission Control and then played 'Jingle Bells' on a harmonica he had smuggled aboard.
Q 17Which of NASA's original Mercury astronauts, grounded by a heart condition, finally flew on Apollo–Soyuz in 1975?
Deke Slayton
Deke Slayton. During his years on the ground he ran the astronaut office and picked the crews for Gemini and Apollo, including the men who went to the Moon.
Q 18Who was the first American woman in space?
Sally Ride
Sally Ride. She applied after spotting a NASA recruitment notice in her student newspaper, one of more than 8,000 hopefuls for 35 places.
Q 19The first American woman in space was a nationally ranked junior player in which sport?
Tennis
Tennis. She played for Stanford's team, counted Billie Jean King among her role models, and still chose a physics doctorate over a career on the court.
Q 20Who became the first African American in space, on STS-8 in 1983?
Guion Bluford
Guion Bluford. He was not the first Black person in space: Cuba's Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez had flown with the Soviets three years earlier, in 1980.
Liberia. From 1983 to 1985 she ran the medical care of Peace Corps volunteers and US embassy staff in both countries, then applied to become an astronaut.
Q 24As of 2026, which astronaut has spent more days in space than any other American or any other woman?
Peggy Whitson
Peggy Whitson. She reached 695 days after retiring from NASA, by commanding private Axiom missions to the station she had twice commanded for the agency.
Q 25Scott Kelly's year-long ISS mission used whom as a ground-based comparison subject?
His identical twin Mark
His identical twin Mark. Scott's telomeres, the caps on his chromosomes, grew longer in orbit, then most of them shortened again within two days of landing.
Q 26As of 2026, who holds the record for the longest single spaceflight, 437 days aboard Mir?
Valeri Polyakov
Valeri Polyakov. A space doctor, he meant the flight as a dress rehearsal for a trip to Mars, and said his goal was to show that a crew could arrive fit to work.
Q 27Who followed Neil Armstrong down the ladder to become the second person to walk on the Moon?
Buzz Aldrin
Buzz Aldrin. Before going outside he quietly took communion in the lander, keeping it off the air because NASA was being sued over the Bible reading broadcast from Apollo 8.
Q 28As of 2026, which cosmonaut holds the record for the most total time in space, over 1,100 days?
Oleg Kononenko
Oleg Kononenko. He passed Gennady Padalka's 878 days in February 2024 while still aboard the station, and stayed on for months more to finish his fifth mission.
Q 29Who was the first woman to pilot and later to command a Space Shuttle mission?
Eileen Collins
Eileen Collins. She started out with a two-year degree from her local community college, and in 2005 NASA gave her command of the first Shuttle flight after the Columbia disaster.
Q 30Who became China's first person in space aboard Shenzhou 5 in 2003?
Yang Liwei
Yang Liwei. He flew as a lieutenant colonel and was made a full colonel days after landing: the promotion is said to have been approved beforehand and kept from him so it would not distract him.