Apollo Program Trivia
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49 free Apollo Program trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Between 1961 and 1972 the Apollo program took 24 people to the Moon and landed 12 of them on it, and this quiz covers the whole arc rather than just the first footprint. It starts with the decisions: Kennedy's deadline, Abe Silverstein naming the program after a Greek god, John Houbolt's lonely campaign for lunar orbit rendezvous, and the contractors who built the Saturn V, the command module and the spidery Lunar Module. Then it walks mission by mission: the Apollo 1 fire and the pure-oxygen cabin, Wally Schirra's head cold on Apollo 7, the Genesis reading of Apollo 8, Spider and Gumdrop, Snoopy and Charlie Brown, Apollo 12's lightning strikes, Alan Shepard's golf shots, the first rover and the hammer-and-feather drop on Apollo 15, Big Muley on Apollo 16, and Apollo 17's night launch and the last man on the Moon. It closes with what came after: 382 kg of Moon rock, Skylab falling on Australia, and the handshake in orbit with Soyuz. If you want the first landing in detail, our separate Apollo 11 quiz goes deep on Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins, and Apollo 13 has its own quiz too. Every answer here was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the program, its missions and its hardware, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
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Q 01Who was the last Apollo astronaut to walk on the Moon, leaving it in December 1972?
Gene Cernan
Gene Cernan, commander of Apollo 17, was the last to leave the surface; three years earlier he had flown Apollo 10's lander to within ten miles of the Moon in a practice run that stopped short of landing.
Q 02Which president told Congress that America should land a man on the Moon before the decade was out?
John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy made the pledge in May 1961, when America's whole record of human spaceflight was one 15-minute hop and the Soviets had already orbited a man; Apollo 11 met his deadline with five months to spare.
Q 03Apollo 11 made the first Moon landing in which lunar 'sea' in July 1969?
Sea of Tranquility
Sea of Tranquility was picked as a smooth, level plain near the equator, yet the computer was taking the lander into a field of boulders and Neil Armstrong had to fly on past them to find a clear spot.
Q 04What was the name of the lunar module that landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon?
Eagle
Eagle was named for the bald eagle on the crew's mission patch, drawn carrying an olive branch to show they came in peace; 'The Eagle has landed', Armstrong radioed on touchdown.
Q 05At its peak, roughly how many people did the Apollo program employ?
400,000
About 400,000 people at more than 20,000 firms and universities worked on Apollo at its height; the spending behind them peaked in 1966, three years before the first landing.
Q 06Roughly what did the Apollo program cost in the dollars of its day?
$25 billion
$25 billion is the usual round figure, about $300 billion in 2025 money and more than half of all NASA spending from 1960 to 1973; budget pressure is why three further landings were cancelled.
Q 07How many people walked on the Moon during the Apollo program?
12
Only 12 men walked on the Moon, two on each of six landings; 24 Apollo astronauts flew there in all, three of them twice, yet nobody ever landed a second time.
Q 08Which mission mode, championed by Langley engineer John Houbolt, was chosen for reaching the Moon?
Lunar orbit rendezvous
Lunar orbit rendezvous won after Houbolt went over his bosses' heads with a letter calling himself 'a voice in the wilderness'; as Apollo 11 landed, von Braun turned to him in Mission Control to give him the credit.
Q 09Which giant launch vehicle, larger than the Saturn V, did NASA plan for Moon flights but never build?
Nova
Nova was the super-rocket sketched to land one big spacecraft whole on the Moon; once NASA settled on a lighter plan in 1962, the Saturn V could do the job and Nova was dropped.
Q 10Which company won the contract to build the Apollo Lunar Module?
Grumman
Grumman's engineers pared the lander's weight so hard that even the seats went: someone saw there was no rule that astronauts had to sit, so they flew the landing standing up.
Q 11In the Lunar Module's original abbreviation, LEM, what did the E stand for?
Excursion
Excursion was dropped in 1966, when the craft became simply the Lunar Module; Apollo manager George Low wrote that NASA feared the word lent the program a frivolous note.
Q 12Which company built both the Apollo command and service module and the Saturn V's second stage?
North American Aviation
North American Aviation paid a price after the 1967 Apollo 1 fire: senators aired a highly critical NASA review of its late, over-budget work, and the firm replaced the head of its space division.
Q 13Which engine, used in a cluster of five, powered the Saturn V's first stage?
F-1
Q 21Apollo 7 achieved which broadcasting milestone?
Live TV from an American spacecraft
Live TV from an American spacecraft began on 14 October 1968, after the crew had at first put the broadcast off; they held up joke cards, one asking viewers to keep those cards and letters coming.
Q 22Apollo 8's crew read the opening verses of which book in their Christmas Eve 1968 broadcast?
Genesis
Genesis was read in turn by all three astronauts from lunar orbit; atheist campaigner Madalyn Murray O'Hair sued NASA over the reading, and the courts dismissed the case.
Q 23Which Apollo 8 astronaut took the famous Earthrise photograph?
William Anders
F-1 engines kept tearing themselves apart in early tests, so engineers set off small bombs inside firing engines and reworked the injector until the flame steadied itself within a tenth of a second.
Q 14What carried each Saturn V upright to its launch pad?
Crawler
Crawler-transporters beat rival plans for a barge canal and a railway; borrowed from the giant shovels of the coalfields, they carried each Saturn V at about 1 mph, and 13 of the rockets flew between 1967 and 1973.
Q 15The Saturn V was developed at the Marshall Space Flight Center in which city?
Huntsville, Alabama
Huntsville, Alabama, was a cotton town until the Army moved Wernher von Braun's rocket engineers there in 1950; it now calls itself Rocket City.
Q 16Under which codename was Wernher von Braun secretly brought to the US after the war with about 1,600 other Germans?
Paperclip
Paperclip, first called Overcast, brought more than 1,600 German scientists and engineers to America; von Braun's team fired captured V-2s in New Mexico, then launched the first US satellite in 1958.
Q 17The 1967 Apollo 1 fire that killed three astronauts happened during what?
A launch rehearsal on the pad
A launch rehearsal on the pad: the 'plugs-out' test was not rated hazardous because the rocket held no fuel, and the crew could not get the inward-opening hatch open in time.
Q 18The Apollo 1 fire spread so fast partly because the cabin atmosphere was what?
High-pressure pure oxygen
High-pressure pure oxygen filled the cabin at 16.7 psi, above the air outside, to flush out nitrogen and seal the hatch; in it, the nylon netting and Velcro lining the cabin burned fiercely.
Q 19Who asked NASA to keep the name Apollo 1 for the flight lost in the 1967 launch-pad fire?
The astronauts' widows
The astronauts' widows asked that Apollo 1 be reserved for the flight their husbands never made; NASA agreed and resumed its numbering at Apollo 4, so there was never an Apollo 2 or 3.
Q 20Which astronaut commanded Apollo 7 in October 1968, the first Apollo flight to carry a crew?
Wally Schirra
Wally Schirra caught a head cold in orbit, sparred with Mission Control and refused to wear his helmet for re-entry; none of the three crewmen ever flew in space again.
William Anders shot it on the fourth orbit, calling 'Hand me that roll of color quick' as Earth cleared the lunar horizon; his first frame of the scene had been in black and white.
Q 24On Apollo 9 the lunar module was nicknamed Spider, so what was the command module called?
Gumdrop
Gumdrop was the crew's name for the cone-shaped capsule; nicknames returned on Apollo 9 because two craft flying apart needed separate radio call signs.
Q 25Apollo 10's spacecraft were named after characters from which comic strip?
Peanuts
Peanuts lent Charlie Brown to the command module and Snoopy, already the mascot of NASA's safety campaign, to the lander, so named because it would 'snoop' low over the landing site.
Q 26Who stayed in lunar orbit aboard the command module while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon?
Michael Collins
Michael Collins circled alone, cut off from all radio contact whenever he passed behind the Moon; he said what he felt there was not loneliness but something close to exultation.
Q 27Apollo 8, 10 and 11 flew which type of trajectory, later abandoned to reach harder landing sites?
Free return
Free return meant the Moon's gravity would swing a crippled ship back toward Earth with no engine burn; later crews gave up that safeguard because it limited where on the Moon they could land.
Q 28What hit Apollo 12 twice during its first minute of flight?
Lightning
Lightning struck 36 and 52 seconds after liftoff and scrambled the telemetry until controller John Aaron made an obscure call, 'Try SCE to Aux'; the crew went on to a pinpoint landing.
Q 29Apollo 12 landed within walking distance of which robotic probe, and brought parts of it home?
Surveyor 3
Surveyor 3 had sat on the Moon since April 1967; Conrad and Bean walked over on their second moonwalk and cut off its camera and other parts so engineers could see how 31 months there had aged them.
Q 30Apollo 12's colour TV broadcast from the surface ended abruptly when Alan Bean did what?
Pointed it at the Sun
Pointed it at the Sun for a few seconds while setting it on its tripod: the glare burned out the camera's tube, and viewers saw nothing more from the surface for the rest of the mission.