NASA
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Challenge yourself with our comprehensive NASA trivia quiz featuring 144 free questions with answers about space exploration history, iconic missions, and groundbreaking discoveries. From the Apollo program to modern Mars rovers, test your knowledge of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's greatest achievements. Whether you're a space enthusiast or casual learner, this quiz will expand your understanding of NASA's role in humanity's exploration of the cosmos.
30 of 144 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who signed the law creating NASA?
Dwight Eisenhower
Dwight Eisenhower signed the act on 29 July 1958; a former general himself, he had asked Congress for a civilian agency rather than hand space to the armed forces.
Q 02Who was the first American in space?
Alan Shepard
Alan Shepard made a 15-minute suborbital hop on 5 May 1961, three weeks after Yuri Gagarin had orbited Earth; an inner-ear disorder then grounded him until surgery let him fly again a decade later.
Q 03Which astronaut circled the Moon alone while his two crewmates made the first landing in 1969?
Michael Collins
Michael Collins stayed with the command module, losing all radio contact for 48 minutes of every lap behind the Moon; he wrote that what he felt there was not loneliness but something close to exultation.
Q 04What famous space telescope was launched in 1990?
Hubble Space Telescope
The Hubble Space Telescope went up with a mirror ground to the wrong shape, which blurred its first images; astronauts fitted corrective optics on a shuttle repair flight in 1993 and the pictures came back sharp.
Q 05Which rocket sent Artemis I on its uncrewed trip around the Moon in November 2022?
Space Launch System
The Space Launch System first flew on 16 November 2022, after a faulty sensor reading and a hydrogen leak had scrubbed two attempts and Hurricane Ian had forced the rocket back into its hangar.
Q 06Which Soviet satellite's launch in October 1957 shocked the United States into creating NASA?
Sputnik 1
Sputnik 1 did little more than beep, but the alarm it set off in Washington, remembered as the Sputnik crisis, produced the law that created NASA less than ten months later.
Q 07Which space shuttle tragically broke apart during re-entry in 2003?
Columbia
Columbia was doomed at launch: a piece of insulating foam fell from its fuel tank and damaged the left wing, and the breach let in hot gas when the shuttle came home on 1 February 2003, killing all seven crew.
Q 08Which small rover became NASA's first on Mars when it landed in July 1997?
Sojourner
Sojourner rode down with the Mars Pathfinder lander on 4 July 1997 and was built to last a week; it kept working for nearly three months, twelve times as long as planned.
Q 09Between them, NASA's two Voyager probes flew past which four planets?
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune: the outer planets line up this way only about once every 175 years, which let Voyager 2 use each one's gravity to swing on to the next.
Q 10Who was the first woman to command a Space Shuttle mission, in 1999?
Eileen Collins
Eileen Collins took command in July 1999; on her 2005 flight she steered the orbiter through a slow backflip so the station crew could photograph its underside for damage, the first time that had been done.
Q 11Who was the first American woman in space?
Sally Ride
Sally Ride flew on Challenger in June 1983, twenty years after the Soviet Union sent up the first woman; she later sat on the boards that investigated both shuttle disasters, the only person to serve on both.
Q 12NASA's 'Great Observatories' program included which four major space telescopes?
Hubble, Compton, Chandra, Spitzer
Each covered a different slice of the spectrum, and the four launched between 1990 and 2003.
Q 13What does the acronym NASA stand for?
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Q 21Which Space Shuttle flew the program's final mission in July 2011?
Atlantis
Atlantis landed for the last time on 21 July 2011, ending 30 years of shuttle flights; nearly nine years passed before astronauts again launched into orbit from American soil.
Q 22Which NASA craft, landed on Mars in 2012, is known for the selfies it takes with its robotic arm?
Curiosity
Curiosity weighs nearly a tonne, too heavy for the airbags that cushioned earlier rovers, so a rocket-powered 'sky crane' hovered above the ground and lowered it on cables.
Q 23Which former V-2 designer led the team that built NASA's Saturn V Moon rocket?
Wernher von Braun
National Aeronautics and Space Administration: the first A is no relic, as NASA still flies experimental aircraft; its X-59 jet, first flown in 2025, is built to go supersonic with a quiet thump in place of the boom.
Q 14What was the first satellite successfully launched by the United States?
Explorer 1
Explorer 1 went up on an Army rocket on 31 January 1958, weeks after the Navy's Vanguard had blown up on its launch pad; its instruments found the first of the Van Allen radiation belts.
Q 15Which mission was the first time a US spacecraft docked in orbit with one from another country?
Apollo-Soyuz Test Project
The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project kept an American and a Soviet craft docked for nearly two days in July 1975; commanders Tom Stafford and Alexei Leonov shook hands between them, and each crew spoke the other's language.
Q 16What is the primary observation wavelength for the James Webb Space Telescope?
Infrared
Infrared light slips through the dust clouds that hide newborn stars and carries the stretched glow of the earliest galaxies; the telescope is named for James Webb, who ran NASA through most of the 1960s.
Q 17Which NASA facility in Houston houses Mission Control for human spaceflight?
Johnson Space Center
Johnson Space Center has run every crewed NASA flight from its Mission Control since 1965, which is why astronauts radio 'Houston'; it was renamed in 1973 for Lyndon Johnson, the Texan president who had just died.
Q 18Who was the first person to walk on the Moon?
Neil Armstrong
Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon on 20 July 1969 with the words 'one small step for man'; he said he had meant 'for a man', and the missing word cannot be heard on the recording.
Q 19Where on the Moon did Apollo 11 touch down in July 1969?
The Sea of Tranquility
The Sea of Tranquility was picked for being flat and close to the equator; even so, the commander had to take over from the computer and fly past a field of boulders before setting down.
Q 20What was the name of the first American space station?
Skylab
Skylab housed three crews in 1973 and 1974, then fell back to Earth in 1979 and scattered debris over the outback, where the Shire of Esperance sent NASA a 400-dollar fine for littering.
Wernher von Braun surrendered to American troops in 1945 and was brought to the United States with his rocket team; fifteen years later NASA made him chief architect of the rocket that sent Apollo to the Moon.
Q 24Which NASA space telescope, launched in 2018, scans the brightest nearby stars for exoplanets?
TESS
TESS rode a Falcon 9 into a stretched 13.7-day orbit in April 2018; its wide-field cameras stare at one strip of sky after another, catching the tiny dips in light as planets cross their stars.
Q 25Which astronaut, a four-term US senator, flew on the Space Shuttle at the age of 77?
John Glenn
John Glenn represented Ohio from 1974 to 1999 and lobbied NASA for two years to fly again as a test subject for research on ageing; he went up in 1998, 36 years after his first spaceflight.
Q 26NASA's New Horizons probe made history in 2015 with the first close flyby of which distant world?
Pluto
Pluto was still a full planet when New Horizons launched in 2006, and was demoted to dwarf planet before the year was out.
Q 27Which university founded and manages NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory?
Caltech
Caltech students nicknamed the 'Suicide Squad' for their risky rocket tests were moved off campus in the 1930s to a dry canyon, the Arroyo Seco, and the laboratory grew up on the spot.
Q 28What kind of animal was Ham, whom NASA launched in a Mercury capsule in January 1961?
A chimpanzee
A chimpanzee: Ham pulled his levers on cue through a 16-minute flight, showing that useful work could be done in space; he was named for the Holloman Aerospace Medical Center, where he was trained.
Q 29NASA's Deep Space Network talks to distant probes from giant dishes in California, Spain and which third country?
Australia
Australia hosts the third site, near Canberra; the three are spread around the globe so that, as Earth turns, at least one of them always has a distant spacecraft in view.
Q 30Which NASA mission in 1976 was the first to land a working spacecraft on Mars and photograph its surface?
Viking 1
Viking 1 touched down on 20 July 1976 and sent back the first clear pictures from the Martian surface; its lander kept working for more than six years, until a faulty command from Earth cut it off in 1982.