Annie Easley
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40 free Annie Easley trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Annie Easley walked into a government laboratory in Cleveland in 1955 looking for a job and stayed 34 years. She arrived before NASA existed and left as one of its most respected programmers, having written code for rocket stages, energy research and environmental studies along the way. This quiz covers the whole story: her childhood in segregated Alabama, the college plans she had to abandon, the newspaper article that changed her direction, the programming languages she learned as machines replaced desk calculators, and the discrimination she met and refused to be stopped by. It also covers the Easley her coworkers knew, who started clubs, volunteered, went back to school while holding down her job and kept busy long after she retired. The questions suit students researching a Black History Month or Women's History Month project, teachers who want a ready-made classroom quiz, and anyone curious about the people behind the early space program. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you pick up the facts as you play.
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Q 01In 2021 the International Astronomical Union honored NASA programmer Annie Easley by giving her surname to what?
A crater on the Moon
A crater on the Moon, about five and a half miles wide, has carried the name Easley since February 2021. It lies in the southern hemisphere of the near side.
Q 02A 1955 Cleveland newspaper story about which pair of NACA workers led Annie Easley to apply there the next day?
Twin sisters
Twin sisters employed at the lab were the subject of the article, and Easley had never heard of NACA before she read it. Within two weeks she was on the payroll.
Q 03At NACA in 1955, what did the job title "computer" mean for new hires such as Annie Easley?
A person calculating by hand
A person calculating by hand is what the title meant: Easley solved engineers' problems with a desk calculator and printed tables of logarithms. The staff got new titles once machines took over the name.
Q 04Which subject did Annie Easley study for two years at Xavier University in New Orleans before moving to Cleveland?
Pharmacy
Pharmacy appealed to her from about age sixteen, perhaps, she joked, because the corner drugstore sold the candy and ice cream. The only program near her new Ohio home had closed, so she changed course.
Q 05Which programming language, developed by IBM in the 1950s, did Annie Easley use to write code for NASA research?
Fortran
Fortran was built for scientific number-crunching, and Easley picked it up as the lab's work moved onto mainframes. Her programs analyzed energy-conversion systems and rocket performance.
Q 06Which high-energy upper-stage rocket, first flown in 1962, did Annie Easley's code support at NASA's Lewis lab?
Centaur
Centaur sent Surveyor landers, Viking probes and dozens of satellites on their way. Its builders named it for the mythical half-horse to suggest a booster's brute force joined to finesse.
Q 07The upper-stage rocket Annie Easley worked on was the first to burn liquid oxygen with which super-cold liquid fuel?
Hydrogen
Hydrogen gives a high-energy burn well suited to upper stages, but it is so cold and hard to handle that the first test flight in 1962 exploded 54 seconds after liftoff.
Q 08Annie Easley's rocket software helped lay the groundwork for the 1997 launch of the Cassini probe to which planet?
Saturn
Saturn was reached in 2004, after a seven-year cruise that began atop the upper stage Easley had worked on. Cassini then circled the planet for thirteen years.
Q 09In 1970 Annie Easley and her room supervisor made a pact to arrive at NASA's Lewis lab wearing what?
Pantsuits
Pantsuits caused quite a stir, she recalled, but one colleague said she had only been waiting for someone to go first. Easley felt the change moved attention from clothes to output.
Q 10What happened to Annie Easley's image when a team photograph was enlarged for an open house at the Cleveland lab?
It was cut out
It was cut out of the display print, though six people had posed at the equipment. A coworker pointed out the gap as they toured the building, and her supervisor agreed she had a right to be upset.
Q 11Annie Easley was born in 1933 in which Alabama city, later a center of the civil rights movement?
Birmingham
Birmingham was strictly segregated when Easley grew up there, the younger sibling of a brother six years her senior. She went back at twenty-one to register to vote.
Q 12An Alabama registrar skipped Annie Easley's voter test on seeing her college, then charged two dollars for what?
A poll tax
A poll tax was the price of registering in 1950s Alabama, and Easley paid it at twenty-one without being asked a single question. She then coached other Black voters for the test.
Q 13Which sport did Annie Easley take up at age 46, going on to found a club for it at NASA Lewis?
Skiing
Q 21Where did Annie Easley travel on official NASA business to watch the uncrewed rockets her group supported lift off?
Cape Canaveral
Cape Canaveral hosted the uncrewed launches that her Launch Vehicles group worked on in the 1980s, and Easley sometimes made the trip from Ohio to see them go.
Q 22Which Soviet satellite, launched two years after Annie Easley joined NACA, set off the space race that created NASA?
Sputnik
Sputnik went up in October 1957, and within a year NACA and its staff, Easley included, had been folded into the new NASA. She recalled real pride at the lab in the contest that followed.
Q 23In her 2001 NASA oral history, Annie Easley said she was never intentionally trying to be what?
A pioneer
Skiing took her to Europe for the first time, and she said she had never seen a mountain until a trip out West. The club she started with eight people in 1979 soon had 200 members.
Q 14After retiring from NASA in 1989, Annie Easley took classes and began a second career as an agent in which field?
Real estate
Real estate classes came after three years of full retirement spent volunteering. She joked that she put more miles on her car as a retiree than as a worker.
Q 15Annie Easley earned a bachelor's degree from Cleveland State in 1977, while working full time, in which subject?
Mathematics
Mathematics took her years of classes, one course at a time at first, and a three-month unpaid leave to finish. NASA then asked for still more training before it would rank her a professional.
Q 16Who told the young Annie Easley that she could be anything she wanted, but that she would have to work at it?
Her mother
Her mother raised two children alone and moved Annie to a better school in fifth grade to back the advice up. Easley was still quoting the line in her late sixties.
Q 17The Cleveland lab where Annie Easley worked for 34 years was renamed in 1999 for which Ohio-born astronaut?
John Glenn
John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth, gave his name to the center ten years after Easley retired. In her day it was the Lewis Research Center, after a longtime head of NACA.
Q 18Annie Easley's earliest NACA work ran simulations for building what at Plum Brook, near Sandusky, Ohio?
A nuclear reactor
A nuclear reactor was planned there for research into atomic-powered aircraft, and her sums covered details as plain as how much cement to pour. It later served space-propulsion studies instead.
Q 19During the 1970s, Annie Easley worked on a NASA project that flew instruments on a jet to study damage to what?
The ozone layer
The ozone layer project recorded its readings on tape aboard the aircraft for analysis back at the lab. Cuts to the space budget had pushed Lewis toward such Earth-focused research.
Q 20Which 2016 film told the story of Black women doing the same job Annie Easley began with, at NASA's Langley center?
Hidden Figures
Hidden Figures follows the women who worked out Mercury flight paths in Virginia; Easley did the same kind of job in Ohio and does not appear in it. The film is based on Margot Lee Shetterly's book.
A pioneer was not her aim, she said: she wanted a job, knew she could do it, and kept her focus on getting it done. The remark came as she described being one of the lab's few Black staff.
Q 24What did Annie Easley say she would do about NASA colleagues who were too prejudiced to cooperate with her?
Work around them
Work around them was her rule, and she added that walking away might be a solution for some people but was not hers. She said her head was not in the sand about bias.
Q 25The New Orleans university where Annie Easley studied is America's only historically Black college of which faith?
Catholic
Catholic nun Katharine Drexel, later made a saint, founded the school with her banking inheritance. Easley recalled having to tell people it was co-ed, not a boys' school.
Q 26What distinction did Annie Easley earn when she graduated from high school in her Alabama hometown?
Valedictorian
Valedictorian of her class, Easley still had to stay after school now and then for what her teachers called talking back. She said she was only voicing her opinions.
Q 27Growing up in segregated Alabama, what did Annie Easley first say she wanted to be?
A nurse
A nurse was her first ambition because, as she understood it, nursing and teaching were the two careers open to Black women. She did not want to teach.
Q 28Annie Easley was one of how many African-American employees at NACA's 2,500-strong Cleveland lab when hired in 1955?
4
Only 4 Black employees were on a staff of about 2,500, and none of the other three worked in her department. Easley said she was simply there to do a job.
Q 29Why did Annie Easley and her husband move from Alabama to Cleveland once he left the military?
To be near his family
To be near his family was the whole reason: she had never heard of the lab that would employ her for 34 years. The marriage ended in divorce, but she stayed in Ohio.
Q 30What did Annie Easley find on her first NACA pay papers that differed from what she was promised at her interview?
A lower pay grade
A lower pay grade appeared on the paperwork: GS-2, not the GS-3 she had been promised, and she was told no more GS-3 posts were available. She took it as an early lesson in looking out for herself.