Space Shuttle Trivia
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50 free Space Shuttle trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
For thirty years the Space Shuttle was how America got to orbit, and this quiz covers the whole programme from Nixon's 1972 go-ahead to Atlantis's last landing in July 2011. It starts with the machine itself: the three main engines, the boosters that gave 85 percent of the thrust and parachuted into the Atlantic, the orange tank that was only orange because paint weighed 600 pounds, the fragile silica tiles, Mach 25 re-entry, the 60-foot payload bay and the Canadian arm that reached into it. Then the fleet, ship by ship: Enterprise, renamed by Star Trek fans and never flown in space; Columbia and its 28 missions; Challenger, Discovery's 39 flights, Atlantis and its Woods Hole namesake, and Endeavour, named by schoolchildren after Captain Cook's ship. The people follow: John Young and Bob Crippen on STS-1, Sally Ride, Guion Bluford, Christa McAuliffe, Eileen Collins, Story Musgrave on all five orbiters and John Glenn back in orbit at 77. Then the hard parts: 73 seconds, O-rings and the Rogers Commission; foam, a left wing and the skies over Texas. Hubble, Mir, Buran and the museums round it out. Easy questions suit anyone who watched a launch on TV; the expert tier asks about payload-bay dimensions, the New Year software rule and the cost per launch. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the Shuttle, its orbiters and its missions, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01After the Shuttle retired in 2011, which company next launched NASA astronauts into orbit from US soil?
SpaceX
SpaceX: in 2020 its crew collected a small US flag the last Shuttle crew had left on the space station, a flag first flown on the very first Shuttle mission.
Q 02What did STS, the Shuttle's official abbreviation, stand for?
Space Transportation System
Space Transportation System: a 1969 plan led by Vice President Spiro Agnew proposed a family of reusable spacecraft, but only the Shuttle was funded.
Q 03The first Shuttle launch, on April 12, 1981, came exactly 20 years after what?
Gagarin's flight
Gagarin's flight: he orbited Earth on April 12, 1961, and a computer fault scrubbed the Shuttle's first attempt on April 10, pushing liftoff onto the anniversary.
Q 04Which two astronauts flew STS-1, the first Space Shuttle mission?
John Young and Robert Crippen
John Young and Robert Crippen flew through a booster overpressure wave that damaged tiles, so NASA later modified the pad's water sound suppression system.
Q 05Which US president approved development of the Space Shuttle?
Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon approved it in January 1972, saying the Shuttle would 'take the astronomical costs out of astronautics'.
Q 06Which company built the Space Shuttle orbiters?
North American Rockwell
North American Rockwell: NASA hauled its first space-worthy orbiter out of the firm's Palmdale plant in 1979 with thousands of heat-shield tiles still missing.
Q 07The first orbiter, Enterprise, was originally going to be given what name?
Constitution
Constitution: NASA once meant to refit this orbiter for spaceflight, but found it easier to convert a test airframe into Challenger instead.
Q 08Why was the prototype orbiter named Enterprise?
A letter campaign by Star Trek fans
A letter campaign by Star Trek fans worked: a White House memo cited 'hundreds of thousands of letters', and President Ford had NASA change the name.
Q 09Enterprise never flew in space; what was it used for in 1977?
Approach and Landing Tests
Approach and Landing Tests: its last two free flights were flown without the tail cone, so it had the shape of an orbiter returning from space.
Q 10Which orbiter was the first to fly in space?
Columbia
Columbia was the heaviest orbiter, so heavy that it was never used to help assemble the International Space Station.
Q 11Which orbiter replacing Challenger was named after the ship of Captain Cook's first voyage?
Endeavour
Endeavour was named by schoolchildren: after the Challenger tragedy NASA ran a national contest, and winning classes proposed Cook's ship.
Q 12Challenger was named after HMS Challenger, a British corvette that led what kind of voyage in the 1870s?
Global marine research
Global marine research: the Royal Navy stripped out most of the warship's guns and fitted laboratories so scientists could study the deep ocean.
Q 13In 1995, which animals damaged a Space Shuttle on its launch pad, forcing a weeks-long launch delay?
Woodpeckers
Q 21During re-entry, which maneuver helped the orbiter slow down?
Steep S-shaped banking turns
Steep S-shaped banking turns: tilting the wings added drag, and flipping the bank from side to side kept the orbiter headed for its runway.
Q 22After landing at Edwards Air Force Base, how did an orbiter get back to Florida?
Piggyback on a modified Boeing 747
Piggyback on a modified Boeing 747: carrying an orbiter on its back made the jet less stable, so NASA added two extra fins to its tail.
Q 23In orbit, what job did the panels lining the Shuttle's payload bay doors do?
Woodpeckers pecked holes in the Shuttle as it stood on the pad, so it rolled back to the assembly building and launched about five weeks late.
Q 14In 1984, Shuttle astronaut Bruce McCandless made the first untethered spacewalk using what?
A jet-powered backpack
A jet-powered backpack: astronauts later used it to catch failed satellites, yet after three 1984 missions it was never flown again.
Q 15Unlike the Apollo capsules before it, how did the Shuttle orbiter come back down to Earth?
As an unpowered glider
As an unpowered glider: with no engines for a second try at the runway, commanders trained in a Gulfstream jet rigged to fly like the orbiter.
Q 16Which company developed the RS-25 main engines mounted at the orbiter's tail?
Rocketdyne
Rocketdyne built them to fly again and again, and 16 leftover Shuttle engines went on to power NASA's new Moon rocket, the Space Launch System.
Q 17Why did the Shuttle's main engines light before its boosters?
To check them first
To check them first: if any engine fell short of 90% thrust within three seconds, the computers shut them all down and the boosters never lit.
Q 18What became of the solid rocket boosters after burnout, about two minutes after launch?
Parachuted to sea for reuse
Parachuted to sea for reuse: recovery crews plugged each nozzle, pumped out the seawater and towed the boosters back to the launch site.
Q 19Which company in Brigham City, Utah, manufactured the solid rocket booster motor segments?
Thiokol
Thiokol: its motor segments crossed the country on rail cars, and after each flight the recovered segments went back to it for refurbishing.
Q 20The orbiter's underside was protected on re-entry by tiles made mainly of what?
Silica ceramic
Silica ceramic: the tiles insulated so well that the orbiter's airframe could be built mostly of aluminum rather than harder-to-work titanium.
Got rid of excess heat
Got rid of excess heat: if the doors failed to open soon after launch, the orbiter's limited backup cooling would force the crew home after a few orbits.
Q 24Which country built the robotic arm that Space Shuttle crews used to grab satellites?
Canada
Canada: when the arm retired to an Ottawa museum in 2013, astronaut Chris Hadfield unveiled it by sending it a 'last command' from the space station.
Q 25Who paid to build Spacelab, the lab module flown in the Shuttle's payload bay?
Europe (ESA)
Europe (ESA) paid to design and build the lab, and in return NASA flew European astronauts on Shuttle missions.
Q 26How could the first Shuttle crews escape?
Ejection seats
Ejection seats: modeled on those of the SR-71 spy plane, they were switched off after the fourth flight, when crews grew too big for everyone to have one.
Q 27Why did NASA never schedule a Shuttle flight to span December into January?
Its software could not handle the date rollover
Its software could not handle the date rollover: the 1970s-era clock would count January 1 as day 366, and only in 2007 did NASA engineers devise a fix.
Q 28Who became the first American woman in space, aboard Challenger on STS-7 in June 1983?
Sally Ride
Sally Ride later sat on the panels that investigated both Shuttle disasters, the only person to serve on both.
Q 29Who became the first African American in space, on Challenger's STS-8 mission in 1983?
Guion Bluford
Guion Bluford flew in 1983, but the first Black astronaut ever selected, Robert Lawrence, died in a 1967 jet crash before he could fly.
Q 30Which speech did Reagan postpone after the Challenger disaster?
The State of the Union
The State of the Union: Reagan had planned to give it that night, but instead mourned the crew in a short address from the Oval Office.