Wernher von Braun Trivia
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59 free Wernher Von Braun trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Wernher von Braun built the first object to reach space, and it was a Nazi terror weapon aimed at London. Twenty-five years later his Saturn V put Neil Armstrong on the Moon. Almost everything in between is disputed, dramatic or both: the SS uniform he claimed to have worn once, the Gestapo cell in Stettin, the surrender arranged by his brother on a bicycle, the tasteless-cooking scandal at Fort Bliss, the Disney films that sold America on spaceflight, and the caution that may have handed Gagarin the first flight. This Wernher von Braun trivia quiz runs 59 questions across the whole arc: his childhood in Prussia and Berlin, Hermann Oberth and the Spaceflight Society, Kummersdorf and Peenemünde, the V-2 and the Mittelwerk slave labour that built it, Operation Paperclip, Huntsville and the Redstone, Explorer 1, Collier's and the wheel-shaped space station, the Marshall Space Flight Center, Mercury-Redstone, Saturn V, and the honours and controversies that followed. Easy questions come first; the last third is for people who know their A-4 from their Juno I. Every answer is verified against Wikipedia's biography of von Braun, with the supporting sentence quoted under each question. Fans of this quiz will also enjoy our Apollo 11 and space race quizzes.
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Q 01Wernher von Braun was the chief architect of which rocket that carried Apollo astronauts to the Moon?
Saturn V
Saturn V was test-flown "all-up", with every stage live on its very first launch in 1967, a shortcut von Braun's cautious team at first thought mad. It worked first time.
Q 02Which animal rode von Braun's Mercury-Redstone rocket into space in January 1961, three months before any American astronaut?
A chimpanzee
A chimpanzee named Ham pulled levers on cue through a 16-minute flight that went higher and farther than planned, then calmly shook hands with the commander of the ship that recovered him.
Q 03Von Braun's V-2 rocket became the first human-made object to do what?
Reach outer space
Reach outer space: a test V-2 fired straight up in 1944 climbed far past the 100 km line, and captured V-2s fired from the American desert were soon filming the Earth from space.
Q 04Under which secret program was von Braun brought to the United States after the war?
Operation Paperclip
Operation Paperclip brought roughly 1,600 German specialists to America, and as the stay became permanent the Nazi records of some recruits, von Braun among them, were quietly covered up.
Q 05Von Braun's rockets launched which satellite, America's first, in 1958?
Explorer 1
Explorer 1 carried James Van Allen's radiation detector, and its odd readings revealed the belts of trapped radiation circling Earth that now bear his name.
Q 06Von Braun was the first director of which NASA centre?
Marshall Space Flight Center
Marshall Space Flight Center was born when President Eisenhower transferred von Braun's Army rocket team to NASA, and he ran it for nearly ten years, through the whole race to the Moon.
Q 07Von Braun was born in 1912 in Wirsitz, then a German town and now part of which country?
Poland
Poland gained the town, now called Wyrzysk, after World War I; von Braun was born there because his father, a Prussian civil servant, was then the district's administrator.
Q 08Von Braun's father, an estate-owning Prussian baron, held which cabinet post in Germany's last governments before Hitler?
Minister of Agriculture
Minister of Agriculture from June 1932, the baron served chancellors Papen and Schleicher in turn, then left government and public life when Hitler came to power in January 1933.
Q 09Which Confirmation gift from his mother did von Braun recall using for an hour or two before bedtime at boarding school?
A telescope
A telescope, which he said he trained on the stars; astronomy became a passion that never left him.
Q 10Which Soviet launch finally won von Braun's Army team permission to put up a satellite of its own?
Sputnik 1
Sputnik 1 did what his arguments could not: a 1954 plan to orbit a satellite on an Army rocket had been turned down, but five weeks after the Soviet launch his team got the go-ahead.
Q 11Whose 1923 book By Rocket into Planetary Space did the teenage von Braun get at boarding school?
Hermann Oberth
Hermann Oberth's book was so dense with equations that the boy, then poor at maths, could not follow a word; he threw himself into the subject and finished school a year early.
Q 12Von Braun said his boyhood firework-powered wagon was inspired by the record-setting rocket cars of which German carmaker?
Opel
Opel heir Fritz von Opel drove rocket-powered cars to speed records; the boy strapped skyrockets to a coaster wagon, and police held him until his father took him home.
Q 13The amateur rocket society von Braun joined in 1930 flew its rockets from a disused ammunition depot in which city?
Berlin
Q 21After a 1943 colour film of an A-4 launch, an enthusiastic Hitler personally made von Braun what?
A professor
A professor: by von Braun's own account, after their talk Hitler strode over, shook his hand and congratulated him as "Professor".
Q 22Which country's air force sent hundreds of bombers against Peenemünde one night in August 1943, killing von Braun's engine designer?
Britain
Britain's Royal Air Force raid, Operation Hydra, killed engine designer Walter Thiel but spared most of the team; its lasting effect was to push V-2 production into an underground factory.
Q 23Hours before the first V-2 struck London in September 1944, another had already hit which newly liberated capital?
Paris
Berlin's city fathers let the club use the overgrown site, and the army officers who came to watch a launch there in 1932 ended up hiring its young student member.
Q 14Why was von Braun's 1934 doctoral thesis on rockets given the dull public title "About Combustion Tests"?
Army secrecy
Army secrecy was the reason: the army had paid for his doctorate on condition he worked in secret, and the full thesis on his liquid-fuel rocket engines stayed a classified military document.
Q 15Which artillery captain arranged the Ordnance Department grant that started von Braun's army rocket work?
Walter Dornberger
Walter Dornberger ran the army's solid-fuel rocket tests and saw what liquid fuel might do for artillery, so he set the 20-year-old up beside his own test stand and stayed his chief for over a decade.
Q 16Norman Davies traced von Braun's career to a 'curious oversight' in which treaty, which left rockets off its list of banned weapons?
Treaty of Versailles
Treaty of Versailles limits on Germany's heavy guns said nothing about rockets, and in the late 1920s army ordnance officers seized on the gap to study them as long-range artillery.
Q 17In 1937 von Braun's army rocket team moved to Peenemünde, a Baltic coast site built jointly with which other service?
The Luftwaffe
The Luftwaffe kept the western end of the site as its own test field. In 1937 a letter asked the 25-year-old technical director to join the Nazi Party, and he went along, judging that a refusal might damage his career.
Q 18Which Nazi leader invited von Braun into the SS in 1940 and had promoted him to major by 1943?
Heinrich Himmler
Heinrich Himmler prized the rocket work and kept promoting him; von Braun later claimed he wore the SS uniform only once, but he was seen in it more often as the war went on.
Q 19The first A-4 to fly successfully, in 1942, carried the logo of Woman in the Moon, a film by which director?
Fritz Lang
Fritz Lang's 1929 silent film about a Moon voyage had a real rocket pioneer as its scientific adviser, and the student von Braun was soon that man's assistant on engine tests.
Q 20Which American physicist's early rockets did von Braun say "blazed the trail" for modern launchers?
Robert H. Goddard
Robert H. Goddard was ridiculed in his own country and written off as a crackpot, yet von Braun said "Goddard was ahead of us all".
Paris was the target of the first two combat V-2s, which both failed after launch; a third struck the city the next morning, and London's first arrived that same evening.
Q 24Which Belgian port, vital to Allied supply lines, was hit by even more V-2 rockets than London?
Antwerp
Antwerp was struck by some 1,600 V-2s as Hitler tried to choke the port feeding the Allied armies; one that hit the packed Rex cinema in December 1944 killed 567 people.
Q 25The underground factory that built von Braun's V-2 drew its slave labour from which concentration camp?
Mittelbau-Dora
Mittelbau-Dora prisoners built the rocket in tunnels under brutal conditions that von Braun saw on a dozen or more visits; more people died making the V-2 than it killed as a weapon.
Q 26Which Nazi security force jailed von Braun in March 1944 after he was reported for careless talk at a party?
The Gestapo
The Gestapo came for him over reported remarks that the war was going badly and that he would rather be building a spaceship; he was freed as too useful to lose.
Q 27Which Reichsminister persuaded Hitler to reinstate von Braun after his 1944 arrest?
Albert Speer
Albert Speer, the armaments minister, argued the rocket could not be finished without him; in Speer's memoirs Hitler agrees to protect von Braun "as long as he is indispensable".
Q 28Where did von Braun have the V-2 blueprints hidden from the SS in the last weeks of the war?
An abandoned iron mine
An abandoned iron mine near the Harz mountains held 14 tons of V-2 papers, and the Americans recovered all of it after his team surrendered.
Q 29How did von Braun break his arm in March 1945?
In a car crash when his driver fell asleep
In a car crash when his driver fell asleep at the wheel; he insisted on a cast so he could leave hospital, and his arm was still in one when he surrendered to the Americans weeks later.
Q 30On 2 May 1945, who cycled up to an American private to say the V-2's inventor wanted to surrender?
His brother Magnus
His brother Magnus was sent because he spoke some English; he rode down to a sentry of the 44th Infantry Division, and the whole party drove in to surrender the same day.