50 free Space Race trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Space Race trivia quiz covers the Cold War contest between the United States and the Soviet Union from the captured V-2 rockets of 1945 to the handshake in orbit in 1975. It opens with the missile race, Sergei Korolev's R-7 and the beeping sphere it launched on October 4, 1957, the Vanguard fireball the newspapers called Flopnik, Explorer 1 and the Van Allen belts, and the dog Laika. It then moves through the first humans in space: Gagarin's single orbit, Alan Shepard's Freedom 7, John Glenn, Valentina Tereshkova, Alexei Leonov's near-fatal spacewalk and Neil Armstrong's spinning Gemini 8. The second half follows the race to the Moon: Kennedy's May 1961 challenge, the Apollo 1 fire and Soyuz 1 crash on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain, the Outer Space Treaty, the N1 rocket that never flew successfully, Apollo 8's Christmas broadcast, Luna 15 sharing lunar orbit with Apollo 11, and the 723 million people who watched the first step. It closes with the Soviet firsts that followed: Salyut, Lunokhod, Venera 7 on Venus and Mars 3, plus Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. Questions run from easy to expert. Every answer was checked against the Wikipedia article on the Space Race, and each explanation adds one more detail worth knowing.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What was the name of the first artificial satellite, launched by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957?
Sputnik 1
The name translates as 'fellow traveler'; it was a beeping metal sphere less than two feet across that weighed under 200 pounds.
Q 02Which Soviet rocket, the first ICBM, launched Sputnik and became the basis for Vostok and Soyuz?
R-7
It flew 6,000 km on August 21, 1957, and its descendants are still flying, making it the world's most reliable space launcher.
Q 03Which German rocket engineer developed the Redstone rocket and first directed the Marshall Space Flight Center?
Wernher von Braun
His wartime A-4, better known as the V-2, was the missile both superpowers copied to start their programs.
Q 04Which secret Soviet chief designer got the Academy of Sciences to commit in 1955 to beating the US to a satellite?
Sergei Korolev
Wikipedia treats that August 30, 1955 decision as the de facto start of the Space Race; he died in January 1966, weeks before Soyuz was ready.
Q 05Which dog became the first animal in orbit, aboard the second Soviet satellite in 1957?
Laika
There was no way to bring her home; in 2002 it emerged she died of stress and overheating on the fourth orbit, not when the oxygen ran out as first claimed.
Q 06What was the first mammal in space, launched by the US on a suborbital flight in June 1949?
A rhesus monkey named Albert II
He died on landing when his parachute failed; the Soviets used dogs for the same job while the US preferred monkeys and apes.
Q 07Which of these mocking names did newspapers give the Vanguard satellite after its December 1957 launch blew up?
Flopnik
Others were Stayputnik, Kaputnik and Dudnik; at the UN the Soviet delegate offered America aid 'under the Soviet program of technical assistance to backwards nations'.
Q 08What was the first successful American satellite, launched on January 31, 1958?
Explorer 1
Its Geiger tube saturated as it passed through a zone of intense radiation, confirming what became known as the Van Allen belt.
Q 09Which scientist built the first US satellite's instruments and had the radiation belts it found named after him?
James Van Allen
He was based at the University of Iowa; the belt is a doughnut-shaped zone of intense radiation above the magnetic equator.
Q 10On which date did President Eisenhower sign the National Aeronautics and Space Act, creating NASA?
July 29, 1958
The law turned the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics into NASA; the bill was steered through Congress by Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson.
Q 11Which Soviet probe was the first spacecraft to hit the Moon, on September 14, 1959?
Luna 2
Its predecessor had missed the Moon entirely, and its successor sent back the first pictures of the far side three weeks later.
Q 12How long did Yuri Gagarin's single-orbit flight aboard Vostok 1 last on April 12, 1961?
108 minutes
The capsule flew in automatic mode; he carried an envelope with the code to unlock manual control in an emergency.
Q 13Roughly translated from Russian and Greek, what does 'cosmonaut' mean?
Sailor of the universe
'Astronaut' comes from the Greek for 'star sailor'; April 12 became Cosmonautics Day in the USSR and, in 2011, the UN's International Day of Human Space Flight.
Q 21Where did Kennedy deliver his 'We choose to go to the Moon' speech on September 12, 1962?
Rice Stadium in Houston
The Houston venue was near the construction site of what became the Johnson Space Center.
Q 22In a September 1963 UN speech, Kennedy proposed that the US and USSR should do what?
Join forces on a mission to the Moon
Khrushchev's son later claimed his father was about to accept when Kennedy was assassinated, but did not trust Lyndon Johnson enough to go ahead.
Q 23Which March 1966 mission made the world's first docking, then spun wildly when a thruster stuck?
Gemini 8
Q 14How did Vostok cosmonauts return to the ground after re-entry?
They ejected and parachuted separately from the capsule
The spherical descent module landed too hard for a person to ride it down safely, so the cosmonaut bailed out at about 7,000 metres.
Q 15What did Alan Shepard name the Mercury capsule that made him the first American in space?
Freedom 7
His flight was suborbital, but he was the first person to take manual control of a spacecraft's attitude and retro-rocket firing.
Q 16How many orbits did John Glenn complete on February 20, 1962, as the first American to orbit the Earth?
Three
Telemetry falsely suggested a loose heat shield during re-entry; he splashed down safely and got a ticker-tape parade like Lindbergh's.
Q 17Faith 7 in May 1963 pushed the Mercury spacecraft to its maximum endurance of how many orbits?
22
NASA dropped a planned three-day Mercury mission because it still would not have beaten the Soviet record, and moved on to Gemini instead.
Q 18Who was the first woman in space, launched on Vostok 6 on June 16, 1963?
Valentina Tereshkova
Unlike the male cosmonauts she was a parachutist factory worker, not a test pilot, and five months later she married Vostok 3 cosmonaut Andriyan Nikolayev.
Q 19Which cosmonaut made the first spacewalk in March 1965 and nearly could not get back in when his suit ballooned?
Alexei Leonov
He had to partially depressurise his suit to squeeze back through the inflatable airlock; it was Korolev's last space first before his death.
Q 20On May 25, 1961, President Kennedy asked Congress to commit to landing a man on the Moon by when?
Before the end of the decade
Only two months earlier he had rejected a NASA budget for a Moon landing as too expensive; Gagarin's flight and the Bay of Pigs changed his mind.
Command pilot Neil Armstrong stopped the spin using the re-entry control system, and he and David Scott came home early but safe.
Q 24How many crewed missions did NASA's two-man program between Mercury and Apollo fly?
Ten
The program took advantage of a two-year Soviet pause while Soyuz was developed, letting the US catch up and pass the USSR in piloted spaceflight.
Q 25Which three astronauts died in the Apollo 1 fire on January 27, 1967?
Grissom, White and Chaffee
The fire in a pure-oxygen cabin during a ground test could not be escaped because the plug-door hatch would not open against the internal pressure.
Q 26Who became the first person to die on a spaceflight when Soyuz 1's parachutes failed in 1967?
Vladimir Komarov
The mission had suffered a failed solar panel and dead stabilisation systems before the emergency re-entry, and the reserve chute tangled with the drogue.
Q 27Which three astronauts flew Apollo 8, the first crewed mission to orbit the Moon, in December 1968?
Borman, Lovell and Anders
Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders made ten orbits in twenty hours; the mission was moved up because the Lunar Module was not ready.
Q 28Which Soviet super-heavy Moon rocket blew up on its launch pad on 3 July 1969?
N1
It exceeded the Saturn V's takeoff thrust by 28% but never had a single successful test flight before cancellation in May 1974.
Q 29How close to the lunar surface did Apollo 10's Lunar Module fly in its May 1969 'dress rehearsal'?
About 47,400 feet
That is the altitude where the powered descent to the surface would begin; the LM had first flown with a crew in Earth orbit on Apollo 9 that March.
Q 30Roughly how many people watched Neil Armstrong's first step on the Moon live on television?
About 723 million
That was at least one-fifth of the population of Earth; Buzz Aldrin joined him on the surface almost 20 minutes later.