Space Trivia for Kids
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50 free Space Trivia for Kids trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Space trivia for kids works best when it starts with the things every kid already wonders about: how many planets there are, which one is biggest, who walked on the Moon first, and what a shooting star really is. These 50 questions begin there and build up to comets, telescopes and the record-breaking spacecraft that older kids love. The set covers the Sun and the eight planets, the Moon landings, the first astronauts and cosmonauts, the International Space Station, Hubble and James Webb, and a few big ideas like light-years and galaxies. Every answer is checked against a cited source and each explanation adds one more fact to remember. Use it for a classroom science warm-up, a bedtime quiz or a family game night. Play a round now and see how many you can get right.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01How many planets are in our Solar System?
Eight
Eight have made the list since 2006, when astronomers ruled that a planet must have cleared other objects out of its orbit, a test that Pluto fails.
Q 02The Sun is made mostly of which gas?
Hydrogen
Hydrogen is the Sun's fuel: in the core it is fused into helium, releasing the energy that leaves as heat and light.
Q 03Which planet is closest to the Sun?
Mercury
Mercury is so close that it laps the Sun every 88 days, the fastest of any planet. Yet it turns so slowly that one sunrise-to-sunrise day lasts two of those years.
Q 04Which planet is the largest in the Solar System?
Jupiter
Jupiter is more than twice as massive as all the other planets put together, yet it spins so fast that its day lasts under ten hours, the shortest of any planet.
Q 05What is the Great Red Spot on Jupiter?
A giant storm
A giant storm that has been spinning for well over a century. It lasts so long partly because Jupiter has no solid ground to slow its winds down.
Q 06Saturn's bright rings are made mostly of what?
Ice
Ice, in billions of chunks from tiny grains to boulders as big as a house. The rings span hundreds of thousands of kilometres, yet are typically only about ten metres thick.
Q 07Which planet is nicknamed the Red Planet?
Mars
Mars owes its colour to rust: iron minerals in its dust and rocks have oxidised, much like an old nail left out in the rain.
Q 08Astronomers released the first picture of which kind of object in 2019?
A black hole
A black hole gives off no light of its own, so the picture shows its shadow: a dark circle ringed by hot gas that glows as it swirls around it.
Q 09Which planet is the hottest in the Solar System, hotter even than the one closest to the Sun?
Venus
Venus is wrapped in a thick blanket of carbon dioxide that traps the Sun's heat, keeping its surface hot enough to melt lead.
Q 10Which planet spins on its side, tilted over by more than 80 degrees?
Uranus
Uranus may have been knocked over by a collision with an Earth-sized object long ago. The tilt gives it extreme seasons, with each pole left in darkness for decades at a time.
Q 11Which planet is farthest from the Sun?
Neptune
Neptune is so remote that it was found by arithmetic: astronomers saw something tugging Uranus off course, calculated where it must be and spotted it there in 1846.
Q 12In 2006, Pluto was officially reclassified as what?
A dwarf planet
A dwarf planet. The trigger was Eris, a world about Pluto's size found in 2005: faced with a possible tenth planet, astronomers voted on what a planet is, and both missed the cut.
Q 13The asteroid belt sits between the orbits of which two planets?
Mars and Jupiter
Mars and Jupiter have the belt between them. For all its countless rocks, everything in it lumped together would weigh less than our Moon.
Q 21What is the name of the galaxy that our Solar System belongs to?
The Milky Way
The Milky Way is named for the pale band it paints across a dark night sky. The word galaxy itself comes from the Greek for milk.
Q 22Which is the largest moon in the whole Solar System?
Ganymede
Ganymede is wider than the planet Mercury, and beneath its icy crust there is thought to be a salty ocean bigger than all of Earth's seas put together.
Q 23Halley's Comet can be seen from Earth roughly how often?
Every 76 years
Every 76 years or so. Edmond Halley realised that comets seen in 1531, 1607 and 1682 were one visitor on repeat, and it came back in 1758 just as he had predicted.
Q 14Who was the first person to walk on the Moon?
Neil Armstrong
Neil Armstrong had to earn it first: with the computer steering toward a field of boulders, he took the controls and landed by hand with well under a minute of fuel left.
Q 15What was the name of the Apollo 11 lunar module that landed on the Moon?
Eagle
Eagle landed with two astronauts while Columbia, the command module, circled overhead with the third. Its lower half, with a commemorative plaque attached, is still standing on the Moon.
Q 16As of 2025, how many people had walked on the Moon?
Twelve
Twelve, two at a time on six Apollo landings. It would have been fourteen, but Apollo 13 had to swing around the Moon and head home after an explosion on board.
Q 17Who was the first human to travel into space, in 1961?
Yuri Gagarin
Yuri Gagarin answered the launch call with 'Poyekhali!', or 'Off we go!', circled the Earth once and was back on the ground, by parachute, in under two hours.
Q 18Who was the first woman in space?
Valentina Tereshkova
Valentina Tereshkova was a textile-mill worker with no pilot training. Her hobby got her picked: she was a keen parachutist, and Vostok cosmonauts had to eject and float down on their own.
Q 19What was Sputnik 1, launched by the Soviet Union in 1957?
The first artificial satellite
The first artificial satellite was a beeping metal ball about the size of a beach ball. Its success so alarmed the United States that Congress created NASA within a year.
Q 20What kind of animal was Laika, the first creature to orbit the Earth?
A dog
A dog, and a stray at that, picked up from the streets of Moscow. She was trained for the tiny cabin by being kept in smaller and smaller cages.
Q 24Which star stays almost fixed in the night sky while the other northern stars wheel around it?
Polaris
Polaris sits almost exactly above Earth's axis, so the sky seems to turn around it. It will lose the job: the axis slowly wobbles, and in about 12,000 years it will point at Vega instead.
Q 25Which spacecraft, launched in 1977, became the most distant human-made object in 1998?
Voyager 1
Voyager 1 overtook Pioneer 10 that year and reached interstellar space in 2012. It carries a gold-plated record of greetings and sounds from Earth, a message for anyone who finds it.
Q 26Which famous space telescope, launched into orbit in 1990, was still working in 2025?
Hubble
Hubble sent back blurry pictures at first, because its main mirror had been polished very slightly too flat. In 1993 astronauts flew up and fitted corrective optics, rather like a pair of glasses.
Q 27What kind of light does the James Webb Space Telescope mainly study?
Infrared
Infrared light is heat, so the telescope's own warmth would drown out the faint glow it hunts. It hides behind a sunshield the size of a tennis court that keeps it below minus 223 degrees Celsius.
Q 28What was Ingenuity, which made history on Mars in April 2021?
A helicopter
A helicopter, built to make no more than five short test hops. It ended up flying 72 times over nearly three years before damage to a rotor blade grounded it.
Q 29A glowing streak of light from a small space rock burning up in Earth's atmosphere is called what?
A meteor
A meteor is the flash, not the rock. The rock, a meteoroid, hits the air at many kilometres a second and burns up, and any piece that survives to reach the ground is a meteorite.
Q 30The word astronaut comes from two Ancient Greek words meaning what?
Star sailor
Star sailor, from the Greek astron and nautes. The word is older than spaceflight: an 1880 novel gave the name Astronaut to an imaginary spaceship.