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50 free Astronauts trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Fewer than 800 people have ever crossed the 100-kilometre Kármán line, and this quiz is about them. It starts with Yuri Gagarin's 108-minute orbit and Valentina Tereshkova's solo flight, moves through Alexei Leonov's first spacewalk and the Mercury Seven, and ends with the record-holders of the space-station era: Valeri Polyakov's 437 days aboard Mir, Peggy Whitson's 695 cumulative days and Oleg Kononenko's 1,100. Along the way there are firsts from every direction — Sally Ride, Guion Bluford, Mae Jemison, Eileen Collins, Yang Liwei, Helen Sharman and Rakesh Sharma — plus the oddities: the cosmonaut stranded in orbit while his country dissolved, the marathon run on a treadmill in space, the twin study, the self-funded tourist who paid $20 million, and the eight-day Starliner test that lasted nine months. Easy questions stick to Gagarin, Shepard and Glenn; the expert tier asks about X-15 pilots, Project Juno and the first non-American, non-Russian ISS commander. Every answer is cited to a page we checked.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01From which language do the roots of the word 'astronaut' ('star sailor') come?
Ancient Greek
Cosmonaut borrows the Greek kosmos via Russian; China's taikonaut comes from Mandarin tàikōng.
Q 02What informal term is used for space travellers from China's program?
Taikonaut
Chinese media formally call them hángtiānyuán, 'heaven-sailing staff'.
Q 03At what altitude does the FAI's Kármán line, the boundary of space, sit?
100 km
The United States awards astronaut wings from 80 km, so the two counts differ.
Q 04By early 2026, roughly how many people had flown to space under the 100 km definition?
About 780
They came from 55 countries, and over 290 had visited the International Space Station by then.
Q 05Which X-15 pilot became the first person to reach space twice?
Joseph A. Walker
He was the only X-15 pilot to top 100 km, doing it on two flights.
Q 06Who was the first person to journey into outer space?
Yuri Gagarin
His Vostok 1 flight on 12 April 1961 lasted 108 minutes.
Q 07How long did Gagarin's single-orbit flight last?
108 minutes
He launched from Baikonur in the Kazakh SSR and became a Hero of the Soviet Union.
Q 08Who was the first woman in space?
Valentina Tereshkova
She flew solo on Vostok 6 in 1963, aged 26, and orbited Earth 48 times.
Q 09What was Tereshkova's job before she was selected as a cosmonaut?
Textile factory worker
She was also an amateur skydiver, which mattered because Vostok cosmonauts ejected and parachuted down.
Q 10Who performed the first spacewalk, in March 1965?
Alexei Leonov
He was outside Voskhod 2 for 12 minutes and 9 seconds, and later commanded the Soyuz half of Apollo–Soyuz.
Q 11Who was the first American in space?
Alan Shepard
His 1961 Mercury-Redstone 3 flight in Freedom 7 was suborbital.
Q 12How old was the Apollo 14 commander, the oldest person to walk on the Moon?
47
He named his 1961 Mercury capsule Freedom 7.
Q 13Who was the first American to orbit the Earth?
John Glenn
He circled the planet three times in 1962 and later served 25 years as a US senator from Ohio.
Q 14At what age did the first American to orbit Earth return to space in 1998?
Q 21Who was the first African-American woman in space, aboard Endeavour in 1992?
Mae Jemison
A physician and engineer, she opened her shifts with the Star Trek line 'Hailing frequencies open'.
Q 22Which Star Trek character inspired the first African-American woman in space?
Lieutenant Uhura
She later appeared in a 1993 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Q 23The first African-American woman in space was a Peace Corps doctor in Sierra Leone and where?
Liberia
She worked there from 1983 to 1985.
Which American holds the record for most cumulative days in space by a US astronaut or any woman?
77
He was the oldest member of the Mercury Seven and the last of them alive.
Q 15How many astronauts made up NASA's original Mercury group announced in 1959?
Seven
Carpenter, Cooper, Glenn, Grissom, Schirra, Shepard and Slayton all eventually flew.
Q 16Which Mercury astronaut was the only one to fly Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions?
Wally Schirra
He took Apollo 7 in 1968 in place of Grissom, who died in the Apollo 1 fire.
Q 17Which Mercury Seven member, grounded by a heart condition, finally flew on Apollo–Soyuz in 1975?
Deke Slayton
Atrial fibrillation kept him out of Mercury; he ran astronaut assignments instead.
Q 18Who was the first American woman in space?
Sally Ride
She flew in 1983 at 32, the youngest American astronaut to that point, and held a Stanford physics PhD.
Q 19Besides physics, what did the first American woman in space study for her BA at Stanford?
English literature
Her PhD research involved X-rays and the interstellar medium.
Q 20Who became the first African American in space, on STS-8 in 1983?
Guion Bluford
He flew four Shuttle missions and had flown 144 combat missions in Vietnam.
Peggy Whitson
Her 695 days include being the first woman to command the ISS, which she did twice.
Q 25Scott Kelly's year-long ISS mission used whom as a ground-based comparison subject?
His identical twin Mark
Tests found changes in his gene expression and longer telomeres after the flight.
Q 26Who holds the record for the longest single stay in space, 437 days aboard Mir?
Valeri Polyakov
The physician-cosmonaut flew the marathon mission in 1994–95.
Q 27Who is the only person to have commanded the International Space Station four times?
Gennady Padalka
He held the cumulative time-in-space record at 878 days until 2024.
Q 28Who holds the record for the most cumulative time in space, over 1,100 days?
Oleg Kononenko
He passed Padalka's mark on February 4, 2024 during his fifth ISS stay.
Q 29Who was the first woman to pilot and later to command a Space Shuttle mission?
Eileen Collins
An Air Force test pilot, she had started with an associate degree in mathematics from a community college.
Q 30Who became China's first person in space aboard Shenzhou 5 in 2003?
Yang Liwei
The flight made China the third country to launch humans independently.