Mae Jemison
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
49 free Mae Jemison trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Mae Jemison entered Stanford at 16, earned a chemical engineering degree and an African-American studies degree by 20, picked up an MD from Cornell, ran Peace Corps medicine in Liberia and Sierra Leone, and then applied to NASA because Sally Ride and Guion Bluford had shown it could be done. In September 1992 she flew on Endeavour's STS-47 as the first African-American woman in space, greeting mission control each shift with a line from Star Trek. These 49 questions cover her life and the mission: the Decatur birth and Chicago childhood, the kindergarten teacher who assumed she meant nurse, the ballet and the West Side Story audition, the Alvin Ailey poster and Bessie Coleman photo she carried to orbit, Spacelab-J and the frog experiment, the married couple on her crew, her resignation in 1993, the Jemison Group, The Earth We Share camps, Dartmouth and Cornell, her Star Trek cameo as Lieutenant Palmer, the DARPA 100 Year Starship and the LEGO minifigure. The expert tier asks about Astronaut Group 12, Patricia Cowings' biofeedback technique and a 1996 traffic stop in Nassau Bay. Every answer is cited to a page we checked and comes with a short explanation, so you learn something even when you miss.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Mae Jemison's 1992 Shuttle flight lasted about how long?
Eight days
Eight days: from launch on September 12 to landing on September 20, the crew of seven split into red and blue teams working 12-hour shifts, so the experiments never stopped.
Q 02Which Space Shuttle carried Jemison into orbit?
Endeavour
Endeavour: NASA's newest orbiter was making only its second flight, and schoolchildren across America had chosen its name, after the ship Captain Cook sailed to the South Pacific.
Q 03Jemison was a co-investigator on an experiment aboard her Shuttle flight that studied which cells?
Bone cells
Bone cells: in weightlessness an astronaut's bones thin by about 1% a month, and Jemison, a physician, was one of the scientists behind the experiment, not only a crew member flying it.
Q 04In which state was Jemison born?
Alabama
Alabama: Jemison was born in Decatur in 1956, but her family moved north when she was three, and it is the big city she grew up in, not her birthplace, that she calls her hometown.
Q 05In which city did Jemison grow up?
Chicago
Chicago: on the South Side in the 1960s, Jemison read her way through the library's science books, and she says she always knew she would go to space.
Q 06Which Star Trek character helped inspire the young Jemison's interest in space?
Lieutenant Uhura
Lieutenant Uhura: Nichelle Nichols played her, and when Jemison filmed a Star Trek guest role of her own decades later, Nichols came to the set to meet her.
Q 07What did a kindergarten teacher assume when Jemison said she wanted to be a scientist?
That she meant a nurse
That she meant a nurse: Jemison answered that no, she meant a scientist, and where teachers doubted her, her parents backed her curiosity.
Q 08Jemison auditioned to play Maria in which musical, ending up as a background dancer instead?
West Side Story
West Side Story: Jemison auditioned because she hoped to dance professionally, having trained since childhood in ballet, jazz, modern and African dance.
Q 09Jemison was only 16 when she entered which California university?
Stanford
Stanford: Jemison won a National Achievement Scholarship to go, and she had already decided at high school that she wanted to work in biomedical engineering.
Q 10Alongside a chemical engineering degree, Jemison earned a BA in which subject?
African and African-American studies
African and African-American studies: outside class Jemison led the Black Students Union and choreographed a show about the African-American experience.
Q 11Where did Jemison earn her medical degree?
Cornell
Cornell: between terms Jemison studied in Cuba, worked in a Cambodian refugee camp in Thailand and spent a summer in Kenya with the Flying Doctors.
Q 12Whose dance classes did Jemison keep attending while at medical school?
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater: Jemison never gave up dancing, and when she flew into orbit years later she took one of the company's posters with her.
Q 13In which two countries did Jemison serve as a Peace Corps medical officer?
Liberia and Sierra Leone
Q 21A photo of which pioneering aviator did Jemison carry into space?
Bessie Coleman
Bessie Coleman: no American flying school would teach a Black woman, so she went to France and earned her pilot's licence there in 1921.
Q 22After leaving NASA, Jemison set up her own company in which city?
Houston
Houston: Jemison had made her home in the area while she was an astronaut at the Johnson Space Center, and she stayed on when she left, running her technology firm from the city.
Q 23Jemison tested a biofeedback technique on herself in orbit as a possible treatment for what?
Motion sickness
Motion sickness: the method trains people to monitor and control their own body's responses, and in 1999 Jemison founded a company to offer it to patients on Earth.
Liberia and Sierra Leone: for two and a half years Jemison ran the health care of Peace Corps volunteers and US embassy staff there, and helped research a hepatitis B vaccine.
Q 14Whose 1983 spaceflights inspired Jemison to apply to NASA?
Sally Ride and Guion Bluford
Sally Ride and Guion Bluford: once the first American woman and the first African-American man had flown, Jemison said, she felt the astronaut program had opened up enough for her to apply.
Q 15Jemison was one of 15 chosen for NASA's first astronaut class after which disaster?
Challenger
Challenger: Jemison first applied in 1985, but the loss of the shuttle and its crew in 1986 froze astronaut selection, so she had to apply all over again the next year.
Q 16Alongside English and Russian, Jemison speaks which African language?
Swahili
Swahili: Jemison took it up as an undergraduate, then spent a medical-school summer working in Kenya, where it is widely spoken.
Q 17In her TED talk, Jemison argued that schools should teach the sciences together with what?
The arts
The arts: Jemison, a dancer as well as a doctor, says science and dance both express human creativity, and she took a dance company's poster into orbit as a salute to it.
Q 18What new role was Jemison given on her Shuttle flight?
Science Mission Specialist
Science Mission Specialist: NASA had just created the job, and it put Jemison in charge of experiments in which the crew, herself included, served as the test subjects.
Q 19Jemison's Shuttle flight was a joint mission between the United States and which country?
Japan
Japan: the laboratory in the cargo bay was named Spacelab-J because its space agency sponsored most of the experiments, and it sent the first of its astronauts to fly on a Shuttle.
Q 20Which Star Trek line did Jemison say at the start of every shift in orbit?
'Hailing frequencies open'
'Hailing frequencies open': Jemison, a lifelong fan of the show, kept the salute up for the whole flight, working on the blue team while the red team slept.
Q 24What did Jemison produce in orbit using NASA's Fluid Therapy System?
Saline solution
Saline solution: the test was whether a spacecraft could purify its own water and mix drip fluids on board, since every ready-made bag launched from Earth adds weight.
Q 25Which animals did Jemison help induce to ovulate aboard her Shuttle flight?
Frogs
Frogs: the eggs they laid were fertilised in orbit so that scientists could see how tadpoles develop when there is no gravity.
Q 26What set Jemison's crewmates Mark Lee and Jan Davis apart from every Shuttle crew before them?
They were married to each other
They were married to each other: the two wed after both had been assigned to the flight, and NASA let the crew stand while insisting its unwritten policy against flying spouses together had not changed.
Q 27Which NASA engineer, later author of the memoir filmed as October Sky, trained Jemison's crew?
Homer Hickam
Homer Hickam: he said NASA was not thrilled to lose an astronaut it had spent so much on training, but that it would have been wrong to stand in Jemison's way.
Q 28As a girl, Jemison turned an infected splinter in her thumb into a science project on what?
Pus
Pus: Jemison admits it sounds gross, but when she asked what the stuff was she was told to go and find out for herself, and she ended up reading everything she could about it.
Q 29Jemison's consulting firm designed a system using what to carry health-care information to remote parts of developing countries?
Satellites
Satellites: Jemison left NASA wanting to put space-age technology to work for developing countries, and her firm also advised them on building solar power plants.
Q 30Jemison named her educational foundation after whom?
Her mother, Dorothy
Her mother, Dorothy: a career schoolteacher, she believed every pupil should be expected to excel, and Jemison set up the foundation with her brother and sister to carry that idea on.