International Space Station Trivia
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59 free International Space Station trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
International Space Station trivia covers a quarter-century of people living in orbit, and this quiz tries to do it justice. It opens with the basics that most people get slightly wrong: how high the station flies, how long an orbit takes, how big it is, and how many agencies and countries run it. Then it builds the station piece by piece, from Zarya on a Proton rocket in 1998 through Unity, Zvezda, Destiny, Kibō, Columbus, the Cupola, Leonardo, BEAM and Nauka, with Canadarm2, Dextre and Robonaut along the way. The middle of the quiz is life aboard: toilets that run on airflow, oxygen made from water, two hours of daily exercise, sleeping booths, lettuce and kale, and bacteria that survived three years outside. Then the people: Bill Shepherd's Expedition 1, Dennis Tito's $20 million ticket, Peggy Whitson, Oleg Kononenko, Frank Rubio, Christina Koch, the Kelly twins, Chris Hadfield's Bowie video, Sunita Williams' orbital marathon and her nine-month Starliner detour, and finally the SpaceX deorbit vehicle that will end the story after 2030. Easy questions suit anyone who has watched the station pass overhead; the expert tier is for people who know their nodes from their nadir ports. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the station, its modules and its crews, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 59 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Run by five space agencies across many time zones, the ISS sets its clocks to which time?
Greenwich Mean Time
Greenwich Mean Time gives the crew one fixed clock in a place where the Sun is useless for telling time, rising and setting on them many times a day, so even their New Year starts at midnight GMT.
Q 02The first crew to live on the ISS arrived in November 2000 and asked to use which radio call sign for it?
Alpha
Alpha was commander Bill Shepherd's pick, requested on the crew's first day aboard, and the ground agreed to it as a call sign. Their arrival began a human presence on the station that ran unbroken for over 25 years.
Q 03Roughly how high above Earth does the ISS orbit?
400 km (250 miles)
400 km (250 miles) is low enough that faint traces of atmosphere still drag on the station, so it is always slowly sinking and needs regular rocket firings to climb back up.
Q 04How long does the ISS take to complete one orbit of Earth?
About 93 minutes
About 93 minutes is all a lap takes at some 28,000 km/h, so the crew flies into a new sunrise or sunset roughly every 45 minutes.
Q 05Including its solar arrays, the ISS is about as large as what?
A football field
A football field is NASA's own yardstick: end to end the station spans 109 metres, a yard short of an American field with its end zones, though the crew's living space inside is closer to a large house.
Q 06NASA's planned space station of the 1980s, later merged with Russia's plans to form the ISS, was named what?
Freedom
Freedom's soaring costs forced repeated redesigns, so none of it ever flew before NASA merged the project with Russia's station plans in 1993.
Q 07The first ISS module, Zarya, was launched on 20 November 1998 aboard which rocket?
Proton
A Proton launched Zarya, the Russian-built 'space tug' that supplied the young station's power, propulsion and guidance until the Zvezda service module arrived.
Q 08Which Space Shuttle carried the American Unity node up to join Zarya in December 1998?
Endeavour
Endeavour's crew caught the orbiting Zarya with the shuttle's robot arm and mated it to Unity, then spacewalkers wired the two modules together.
Q 09Expedition 1's commander, Bill Shepherd, had previously served in which elite military unit?
Navy SEALs
His Navy SEALs training paid off in 1986, when Shepherd helped with the underwater salvage of the wreckage of shuttle Challenger.
Q 10Which US restaurant chain delivered its signature dish to cosmonaut Yuri Usachov aboard the ISS in 2001?
Pizza Hut
Pizza Hut paid Russia's space agency for the stunt, having already put its logo on the rocket that launched a station module the year before.
Q 11The first laboratory module on the ISS was NASA's first permanent orbital lab since which station was vacated in 1974?
Skylab
Skylab was meant to wait for a shuttle reboost, but high solar activity dragged it down early, and it fell over Australia in 1979.
Q 12Which country contributed the laboratory that is the largest single pressurised module on the ISS?
Japan
Japan's lab, Kibō, meaning 'hope', was carried up in pieces on three shuttle flights in 2008 and 2009.
Q 13Europe's Columbus laboratory on the ISS is operated from a control centre in which country?
Germany
Germany hosts the Columbus Control Centre near Munich, which relays commands so researchers across Europe can run their experiments from the ground.
Q 21The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer on the station's truss studies cosmic rays for evidence of what?
Dark matter
Dark matter hunter AMS was never designed to be serviced in orbit, yet spacewalkers cut into its pipes in 2019 and 2020 to fit a new cooling system.
Q 22The station's toilets use what to move waste away from the body in the absence of gravity?
Air flow
Air flow pulls the waste away; urine then goes to a recycling system that turns it back into drinking water, which the crew really does drink.
Q 23How does the Russian segment's main oxygen generator on the ISS make breathable air?
Electrolysing water
Q 14Which ISS module gives astronauts a seven-window view of Earth?
Cupola
The Cupola was conceived as a workstation, so crews use it to steer the station's robotic arm while watching dockings and spacewalks.
Q 15Which ISS storage module, delivered on Discovery's final flight in 2011, is named after an Italian Renaissance figure?
Leonardo
Leonardo was later moved robotically from Unity to Tranquility in 2015, freeing a berthing port for cargo ships as NASA readied the station for commercial crew.
Q 16Which company built the experimental expandable module BEAM, attached to the ISS in 2016?
Bigelow Aerospace
Bigelow Aerospace built BEAM for a two-year test, but the expandable room held up so well that NASA kept it as a storeroom and later took ownership of it.
Q 17Russia's Nauka module docked in July 2021, replacing which module that was deorbited to make room?
Pirs
Pirs had served as a spacewalk airlock and docking port since 2001, until a Progress cargo ship pulled it away to burn up over the Pacific.
Q 18How does Canadarm2, the station's main robotic arm, move itself around the outside of the ISS?
End over end like an inchworm
End over end like an inchworm, Canadarm2 anchors one end to a power-and-data fixture on the hull while the free end reaches for the next one.
Q 19Why did Russian civilian Yulia Peresild spend about 12 days aboard the ISS in October 2021?
To shoot a feature film
To shoot a feature film, The Challenge; with no film crew in orbit, director Klim Shipenko also ran the camera, sound and lights.
Q 20Robonaut 2, the robot delivered to the ISS in 2011, later received what upgrade in 2014?
A pair of legs
A pair of legs was meant to let R2 climb around inside the station, but the upgrade triggered power faults, so NASA brought the robot home for repairs in 2018.
Electrolysing water in the Elektron unit gives oxygen and waste hydrogen; when it broke down in early 2005, controllers tapped a cargo ship's oxygen stores.
Q 24After comedian Stephen Colbert won NASA's 2009 online vote to name a station module, what did NASA name after him?
A treadmill
A treadmill: NASA called the module Tranquility but named its new exercise machine COLBERT, the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill.
Q 25Sleeping quarters on the ISS are best described as what?
Person-sized soundproof booths
Person-sized soundproof booths each need a fan: in weightlessness exhaled carbon dioxide doesn't drift away, so it would pool around a sleeper's head.
Q 26Seen from the ground at its brightest, the sunlit ISS shines about as bright as which planet?
Venus
Venus is its rival, but the ISS is seen only within a few hours of dawn or dusk, when the ground is dark while the station overhead still catches sunlight.
Q 27The ISS's 51.6-degree inclination was chosen so that Russian launches from Baikonur would avoid what?
Overflying China
Overflying China on a due-east launch would have dropped spent booster stages there, so Russia flies a steeper path, which also carries the station over most of the inhabited Earth.
Q 28As of 2025, which crewed vehicle had made the most flights to the ISS?
Soyuz
Soyuz was the only way for anyone to reach the station between the shuttle's retirement in 2011 and the first crewed Dragon flight in 2020.
Q 29Who paid a reported $20 million in 2001 to become the first self-funded visitor to the ISS?
Dennis Tito
Dennis Tito had once been a NASA engineer, yet NASA objected to his trip on safety grounds; he flew anyway on a seat bought from Russia and spent nearly eight days in orbit.
Q 30Cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko set the record for most total time in space in 2024, at about how long?
Three years
About three years: a fifth mission lasting 374 days, twice the usual stay, carried Kononenko past Gennady Padalka's 878 days to a total of 1,111.