Spaceships
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50 free Spaceships trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Spaceships sit at the meeting point of engineering and imagination. Some were welded together in hangars and flown by people who trusted their lives to them. Others exist only on screen or on the page, yet fans can describe their corridors from memory. This quiz covers both kinds. The real side runs from the earliest capsules and Moon landers through shuttles, far-travelling probes and the privately built rockets of the 2020s. The fictional side visits the best-known ships of film, television, novels, comics and video games, including how some of them got their names. It suits anyone who grew up on launch broadcasts or sci-fi marathons, and it works for a pub quiz, a classroom warm-up or a long car ride. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you leave with a story as well as a score.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Space Shuttle orbiter, first planned as Constitution, was renamed after a fan letter campaign?
Enterprise
Enterprise got its name after Star Trek fans sent the White House hundreds of thousands of letters. It flew glide tests only: NASA dropped its plan to refit the orbiter for space.
Q 02Which Star Wars ship did Han Solo win from Lando Calrissian in a game of sabacc?
Millennium Falcon
The Millennium Falcon is said to have been shaped after a hamburger, with an olive on the side for the cockpit. Han won it from Lando several years before the first film.
Q 03The Apollo 10 command and lunar modules were named after characters from which comic strip?
Peanuts
Peanuts supplied both call signs: the command module was Charlie Brown and the lunar module was Snoopy. Creator Charles Schulz drew mission artwork for NASA.
Q 04Which Apollo 11 lunar module carried Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin down to the Moon's surface?
Eagle
Eagle touched down in the Sea of Tranquility on 20 July 1969 while Michael Collins circled overhead in the command module Columbia. Its descent stage was left behind on the Moon.
Q 05Which animals does Kirk's crew carry through time aboard a captured Klingon ship in Star Trek IV?
Humpback whales
Humpback whales are extinct in Kirk's century, so the crew slingshot around the Sun to 20th-century San Francisco to fetch some. Only the whales can answer a probe wrecking Earth.
Q 06Which stray dog from Moscow became the first animal to orbit Earth, aboard Sputnik 2 in 1957?
Laika
Laika showed that a living creature could survive launch and weightlessness, though she died of overheating within hours. No way of bringing her home had been built.
Q 07Which Doctor Who ship is stuck looking like a British police box because its chameleon circuit broke?
TARDIS
The TARDIS is meant to blend in wherever it lands, but the Doctor's has been jammed in one shape since the first episode. Its name stands for Time And Relative Dimension In Space.
Q 08Which term for UFOs did the press coin after pilot Kenneth Arnold's 1947 sighting near Mount Rainier?
Flying saucer
Flying saucer was probably a headline writer's phrase. Arnold himself reported nine shiny objects racing past the mountain at an estimated 1,200 miles per hour.
Q 09Which Soviet spacecraft carried Yuri Gagarin on the first human spaceflight in April 1961?
Vostok 1
Vostok 1 circled Earth once in 108 minutes, and Gagarin did not land inside it. He ejected about 7 km up and parachuted to the ground separately.
Q 10Which NASA rocket launched all 24 astronauts who flew to the Moon in the Apollo programme?
Saturn V
Saturn V was the first rocket to carry humans beyond low Earth orbit. Thirteen were launched from Kennedy Space Center between 1967 and 1973.
Q 11Which spacecraft does Cooper pilot through a wormhole in Christopher Nolan's 2014 film Interstellar?
Endurance
Endurance ages 23 years during one short landing, because time on the planet below runs far slower so close to a black hole.
Q 12Which space tug, named after a Joseph Conrad novel, carries Ripley's crew in the 1979 film Alien?
Nostromo
Nostromo was a late change of name for the ship, and its escape shuttle, Narcissus, borrows from a Conrad title as well. The crew of seven shares the tug with a cat called Jones.
Q 13Which starfighter does Luke Skywalker fly in the battle that destroys the first Death Star?
X-wing
The X-wing is named for the shape its wings make when they open into attack position. Its pilots became Red squadron because blue markings clashed with bluescreen filming.
Q 21The ship Rocinante in the TV series The Expanse takes its name from the horse of which literary hero?
Don Quixote
Don Quixote rides the horse Rocinante through Cervantes's novel of 1605 and 1615. The Expanse crew rename their ship early in the story, and it becomes the main setting.
Q 22Which computer controls the spacecraft Discovery One on its way to Jupiter in 2001: A Space Odyssey?
HAL 9000
HAL 9000 runs most of the ship's operations and talks with a human-like personality. Three of the five astronauts aboard spend the trip in suspended animation.
Q 23Which animated sitcom follows a delivery crew who fly the Planet Express ship in the 31st century?
Futurama
Q 14Which Star Trek villains travel in giant cube-shaped ships and absorb other species into a hive mind?
The Borg
The Borg first appeared in the Next Generation episode Q Who, where one of their cubes proved more than a match for the Federation flagship. A single cube can take on a whole fleet.
Q 15Which Firefly-class transport ship does Captain Malcolm Reynolds name after a battle that ended in defeat?
Serenity
Serenity is named after the Battle of Serenity Valley, the last action of the civil war that Mal and Zoe fought in. The ship is an old model that earns its keep hauling cargo.
Q 16Which ship does Zaphod Beeblebrox steal at its own unveiling in Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide series?
Heart of Gold
Heart of Gold runs on the Infinite Improbability Drive, and Zaphod was Galactic President when he made off with it. He used the office to get close to the ship.
Q 17Which NASA probe, launched in 1977, has travelled farther from Earth than any other spacecraft?
Voyager 1
Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space in August 2012, the first spacecraft ever to do so. It took 35 years of flight to get there.
Q 18Which famous space telescope did Space Shuttle Discovery carry into orbit in April 1990?
Hubble
Hubble went up with a main mirror ground to the wrong shape, which blurred its view. Astronauts fitted corrective optics in 1993 to fix it.
Q 19Which capsule made the first privately operated orbital flight with astronauts aboard, in May 2020?
Crew Dragon
Crew Dragon carried Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken on the first crewed orbital launch from American soil since the shuttle retired in 2011. They named their capsule Endeavour.
Q 20Which NASA programme between Mercury and Apollo flew two-person capsules to practise docking?
Gemini
Gemini is Latin for twins, a nod to its crew of two. Its astronauts stayed up for nearly 14 days, longer than a round trip to the Moon takes.
Futurama begins when pizza delivery boy Fry falls into a cryogenic pod just after midnight on 1 January 2000. He wakes to a job hauling parcels between planets.
Q 24Which British sitcom is set on a mining spacecraft where Dave Lister wakes as the last living human?
Red Dwarf
Red Dwarf opens with a radiation leak that kills everyone aboard while Lister sits out a punishment in suspended animation. He wakes three million years later.
Q 25Which ageing warship is being turned into a museum when the Cylons launch their surprise attack?
Galactica
Galactica is fifty years old and midway through decommissioning, with much of its armour already stripped, when war breaks out again. Commander Adama takes it back into service.
Q 26In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the alien mothership lands beside which American landmark?
Devils Tower
Devils Tower haunts Roy Neary before he ever sees it. He keeps modelling the peak, even hauling dirt and bricks into his house to sculpt a giant replica.
Q 27Which Apollo 13 lunar module served as a lifeboat for three astronauts after an oxygen tank exploded?
Aquarius
Aquarius was designed to support two men for two days, but Mission Control improvised ways to make it keep three alive for four. Jim Lovell chose its name.
Q 28Which Mercury capsule carried John Glenn on the first American orbital spaceflight in February 1962?
Friendship 7
Friendship 7 circled Earth three times before splashing down in the North Atlantic, where the destroyer USS Noa picked it up. The whole flight lasted under five hours.
Q 29Which Russian crewed spacecraft, whose name means 'union', has been in service since the 1960s?
Soyuz
Soyuz was the sole way for astronauts to reach the International Space Station between the Space Shuttle's retirement in 2011 and 2020. It has made more than 140 flights.
Q 30Which Blue Origin rocket, named after the first American in space, flew Jeff Bezos in July 2021?
New Shepard
New Shepard honours Alan Shepard, and its first crewed flight lasted about ten minutes. Bezos shared the capsule with his brother Mark, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen.