National Air and Space Museum
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
50 free National Air and Space Museum trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The National Air and Space Museum holds the real thing. The aircraft and spacecraft hanging from its ceilings are almost all originals, the very machines that made the flights you read about in school, and every one of them arrived with a story attached. This quiz collects the best of those stories as fun facts you can test yourself on. There are questions on how the collection started, on the building on the National Mall and its giant hangar annex beside an airport, on record-setting planes and capsules, and on the oddities visitors walk straight past: film props, feuds, and the things museum staff found when they looked closely. It suits families planning a trip to the capital, teachers building a lesson on flight, and trivia hosts who want a round with a surprise behind every answer. Each question comes with a short explanation, so you leave knowing more than you came with.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which TV series' 11-foot starship filming model is displayed in the National Air and Space Museum?
Star Trek
Star Trek's original USS Enterprise model reached the Smithsonian in 1974, dirty and packed in three crates. Paramount had donated it after the series ended.
Q 02Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis, now in the National Air and Space Museum, ended its 1927 solo flight where?
Paris
Paris came into view after 33 and a half hours alone in the air. The following year Lindbergh flew the plane to Washington himself and presented it to the Smithsonian.
Q 03Which Star Wars droid did model makers hide on the Close Encounters mothership at the Udvar-Hazy Center?
R2-D2
R2-D2 was fixed to the underside as an in-joke by Dennis Muren, who had just finished work on Star Wars. He also tucked in a pea-sized TIE fighter.
Q 04Whose Moon spacesuit did the National Air and Space Museum conserve using $719,779 raised on Kickstarter?
Neil Armstrong
Neil Armstrong's suit was the star of the Moon landing's 50th anniversary in 2019, when the museum also placed 15 replicas of it in Major League Baseball stadiums.
Q 05Which aviator's red Lockheed Vega, flown solo across the Atlantic in 1932, is in the National Air and Space Museum?
Amelia Earhart
Amelia Earhart fought ice and engine trouble for almost 15 hours, then set the Vega down in a pasture in Northern Ireland. She was the first woman to make the crossing alone.
Q 06For the Moon landing's 50th anniversary, the National Air and Space Museum projected a show onto which landmark?
Washington Monument
The Washington Monument became the screen for Apollo 50: Go for the Moon, and more than 500,000 people came out to watch the story of the landing play across it.
Q 07Which astronaut became the first American to orbit Earth in Friendship 7, now a National Air and Space Museum treasure?
John Glenn
John Glenn chose the capsule's name with his wife and children, who went through dictionaries and a thesaurus for ideas. He circled Earth three times in 1962.
Q 08The 1903 Wright Flyer, star of the National Air and Space Museum, made its first flights near which town?
Kitty Hawk
Kitty Hawk lay four miles north of the dunes where the brothers flew. The plane left the ground only four times, all on one December day, before a gust wrecked it.
Q 09Which actor plays the guard who stops rockets launching inside the National Air and Space Museum in a 2009 comedy?
Ben Stiller
Ben Stiller returned as night guard Larry Daley in Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian. Mindy Kaling has a small part as one of the museum's docents.
Q 10The Apollo 11 crew's Mobile Quarantine Facility, now at the Udvar-Hazy Center, was converted from what?
An Airstream trailer
An Airstream trailer kept the crew sealed in aboard the carrier USS Hornet and then in the hold of a cargo plane to Houston. President Nixon welcomed them home while they were still shut inside.
Q 11What is the name of the Apollo 11 command module, long a centrepiece of the National Air and Space Museum?
Columbia
Columbia was the only part of the Apollo 11 spacecraft to return to Earth. A 3D scan in 2016 revealed notes the astronauts had written on its inside walls.
Q 12Which pilot broke the sound barrier in the orange Bell X-1 that hangs in the National Air and Space Museum?
Chuck Yeager
Chuck Yeager named the rocket plane Glamorous Glennis after his wife. It never took off by itself for the record flight: a B-29 carried it up and dropped it from the bomb bay.
Q 13Which bomber's planned 1995 exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum caused a row that cost the director his job?
Enola Gay
Q 21The touchable Moon rock at the National Air and Space Museum was inspired by a scientist's pilgrimage to which city?
Mecca
Mecca is where Farouk El-Baz touched the Black Stone as a boy. The Apollo scientist later suggested that museum visitors should be able to lay a finger on a piece of the Moon.
Q 22Which president signed the 1946 act creating the National Air Museum, forerunner of the Air and Space Museum?
Harry S. Truman
Harry S. Truman signed the law in August 1946. With no building of its own, the new museum showed planes in a metal hut nicknamed the Tin Shed and lined its rockets up outdoors.
Q 23Which president called the National Air and Space Museum a birthday present to America at its Bicentennial opening?
Gerald Ford
Enola Gay's exhibit script angered veterans' groups, and 81 members of Congress called for director Martin Harwit to go. The cut-down display still drew nearly four million visitors.
Q 14Which Space Shuttle orbiter, veteran of 39 missions, was delivered to the Udvar-Hazy Center in 2012?
Discovery
Discovery flew more often than any other Space Shuttle, then made its last trip on the back of a modified jumbo jet. It took the place of a test orbiter that had never been to space.
Q 15Which spy plane flew from Los Angeles to Washington in 64 minutes on its 1990 delivery flight to the Smithsonian?
SR-71 Blackbird
The SR-71 Blackbird averaged more than 2,100 miles per hour and set four speed records on the trip, a showy send-off for a plane the Air Force was retiring.
Q 16Which supersonic airliner, once flown by Air France, is preserved in the main hangar of the Udvar-Hazy Center?
Concorde
Concorde could cross the Atlantic cruising at twice the speed of sound for three-quarters of the way. A British Airways sister ship is preserved in Seattle.
Q 17The Udvar-Hazy Center, the National Air and Space Museum's hangar annex, sits beside the runways of which airport?
Dulles International
Dulles International is joined to the annex by a private taxiway, so some aircraft have simply landed and rolled straight into the collection.
Q 18Steven F. Udvar-Hazy, whose $65 million gift built the National Air and Space Museum's annex, emigrated from where?
Hungary
Hungary is where the future billionaire was born. He made his money by co-founding International Lease Finance Corporation, which buys airliners and rents them out to airlines.
Q 19Which astronaut who flew to the Moon ran the National Air and Space Museum when its Mall building opened in 1976?
Michael Collins
Michael Collins became director in 1971 and steered the building through construction. Two years earlier he had circled alone in orbit while his two crewmates walked on the surface.
Q 20At the National Air and Space Museum's 1976 opening, a signal from which Mars-bound spacecraft cut the ribbon?
Viking 1
Viking 1 was closing in on the planet when its signal moved a mechanical arm that split the ribbon. Less than three weeks later its lander touched down safely on the surface.
Gerald Ford opened the doors three days before the nation's 200th birthday, which made the new museum one of the highlights of the Bicentennial summer.
Q 24The National Air and Space Museum's collection began in 1876 with a Chinese gift of twenty what?
Kites
Kites from the Chinese Imperial Commission stayed behind after Philadelphia's Centennial Exposition, once a Smithsonian official persuaded exhibitors that shipping their displays home would cost too much.
Q 25Which architect of the firm HOK designed the National Air and Space Museum as four marble cubes linked by glass halls?
Gyo Obata
Gyo Obata kept the building low and plain so that it would not compete with the Capitol nearby. Its west glass wall doubles as a giant door for bringing aircraft inside.
Q 26The National Air and Space Museum stands where Armory Square Hospital treated badly wounded soldiers of which war?
Civil War
Civil War casualties reached it from the battlefields in the worst condition of any sent to Washington. Temporary government buildings then covered the area until the 1960s.
Q 27Which spacecraft in the National Air and Space Museum made the first privately funded crewed spaceflight in 2004?
SpaceShipOne
SpaceShipOne won the $10 million Ansari X Prize that year and was retired at once. It had first gone supersonic on the 100th anniversary of the Wright brothers' first powered flight.
Q 28Which aircraft in the National Air and Space Museum first circled the globe without stopping or refuelling, in 1986?
Rutan Voyager
Rutan Voyager stayed up for nine days. Its fuel-heavy wingtips scraped along the runway on takeoff and both winglets broke off before the trip had properly begun.
Q 29Which wealthy aviator set a 1935 landplane speed record in the silver H-1 Racer at the National Air and Space Museum?
Howard Hughes
Howard Hughes clocked 352 miles per hour, ran the tanks dry and crash-landed in a beet field without serious harm. The racer was donated to the Smithsonian in 1975.
Q 30The Smithsonian's Spirit of St. Louis has no front windscreen, so what let its pilot see ahead?
A periscope
A periscope was fitted because the main fuel tanks sat in front of the cockpit, where a windscreen would be. Mostly, though, Lindbergh turned the plane slightly and looked out of the side.