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60 free International Space Station trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
International Space Station trivia covers a quarter-century of people living in orbit, and this quiz tries to do it justice. It opens with the basics that most people get slightly wrong: how high the station flies, how long an orbit takes, how big it is, and how many agencies and countries run it. Then it builds the station piece by piece, from Zarya on a Proton rocket in 1998 through Unity, Zvezda, Destiny, Kibō, Columbus, the Cupola, Leonardo, BEAM and Nauka, with Canadarm2, Dextre and Robonaut along the way. The middle of the quiz is life aboard: toilets that run on airflow, oxygen made from water, two hours of daily exercise, sleeping booths, lettuce and kale, and bacteria that survived three years outside. Then the people: Bill Shepherd's Expedition 1, Dennis Tito's $20 million ticket, Peggy Whitson, Oleg Kononenko, Frank Rubio, Christina Koch, the Kelly twins, Chris Hadfield's Bowie video, Sunita Williams' orbital marathon and her nine-month Starliner detour, and finally the SpaceX deorbit vehicle that will end the story after 2030. Easy questions suit anyone who has watched the station pass overhead; the expert tier is for people who know their nodes from their nadir ports. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the station, its modules and its crews, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The International Space Station is operated by how many national or regional space agencies?
Five
NASA, Roscosmos, ESA, JAXA and Canada's CSA, spanning fifteen countries in the most legally complex space programme in history.
Q 02The ISS has been continuously inhabited since the arrival of Expedition 1 in which year?
2000
That is the longest continuous human presence in space; the first module had gone up two years earlier.
Q 03Roughly how high above Earth does the ISS orbit?
400 km (250 miles)
That keeps it below the Van Allen radiation belts and most space debris; the orbit still decays and needs regular reboosts.
Q 04How long does the ISS take to complete one orbit of Earth?
About 93 minutes
It circles the planet 15.5 times a day at 7.67 km/s, so the crew sees a sunrise or sunset roughly every 45 minutes.
Q 05Including its solar arrays, the ISS is about as large as what?
A football field
It measures 109 by 73 metres, with a pressurised volume comparable to a Boeing 747.
Q 06The ISS merged plans for the Soviet Mir-2 with a planned American outpost named what?
Freedom
The Zvezda module was actually built in 1985 as a Mir-2 component before the two projects were combined.
Q 07The first ISS module, Zarya, was launched on 20 November 1998 aboard which rocket?
Proton
Zarya means 'sunrise'; it was funded by the US and by the 2010s served mainly as storage.
Q 08Which Space Shuttle carried the American Unity node up to join Zarya in December 1998?
Endeavour
Unity, or Node 1, was built of steel by Boeing at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
Q 09The Russian service module Zvezda, which provided the first living quarters, has a name meaning what?
Star
It docked to Zarya in July 2000 and became the third component of the ISS.
Q 10Expedition 1's commander, Bill Shepherd, had previously served in which elite military unit?
Navy SEALs
Russia questioned his selection because his three earlier shuttle flights totalled only about two weeks in space.
Q 11The Expedition 1 crew launched from Baikonur on 31 October 2000 using which historic pad?
Gagarin's Start
Yuri Gagarin had launched from the same pad in 1961; the crew stayed aboard 136 days.
Q 12The ISS lab Destiny was NASA's first permanent orbital research facility since which station was vacated in 1974?
Skylab
Atlantis delivered it on STS-98 in February 2001 and it was berthed to Unity's forward port.
Q 13Which country contributed the Kibō laboratory, the largest single pressurised module on the ISS?
Japan
Its name means 'hope'; it was built at Tsukuba Space Center and assembled over three shuttle flights in 2008 and 2009.
Q 21Robonaut 2, the humanoid robot delivered to the ISS in 2011, later received what upgrade in 2014?
A pair of legs
It flew up on the last flight of Discovery, STS-133.
Q 22The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, fixed to the station's truss in 2011, mainly hunts for what?
Dark matter
NASA has called the particle-physics experiment as important as the Hubble Space Telescope.
Q 23The station's toilets use what to move waste away from the body in the absence of gravity?
Air flow
Urine is diverted to the Water Recovery System and turned back into drinking water; there are three toilets, in Zvezda, Tranquility and Nauka.
Q 14The Columbus laboratory, ESA's largest contribution to the ISS, was built in which country?
Germany
Along with Harmony and Tranquility, the pressure shell work was done by Thales Alenia Space in Turin.
Q 15Which module, named from the Italian for 'dome', gives astronauts a seven-window view of Earth?
Cupola
A shuttle delivered it in February 2010; its 80 cm central window is the largest ever flown in space.
Q 16Which ISS storage module, delivered on Discovery's final flight in 2011, is named after an Italian polymath?
Leonardo
It had been a Multi-Purpose Logistics Module ferried back and forth before being left permanently attached.
Q 17Which company built the experimental expandable module BEAM, attached to the ISS in 2016?
Bigelow Aerospace
Its founder had bought NASA's cancelled TransHab inflatable patents; British astronaut Tim Peake plucked BEAM from a Dragon's trunk with Canadarm2.
Q 18Russia's Nauka module docked in July 2021, replacing which module that was deorbited to make room?
Pirs
Nauka arrived with the European Robotic Arm, which can walk itself around the Russian segment.
Q 19Canadarm2, the station's main robotic arm, can move around the outside of the ISS how?
End over end like an inchworm
It is 17.6 metres long with seven joints and can also ride the Mobile Base System along the main truss.
Q 20Dextre, the two-armed robotic 'hand' that works with Canadarm2, was contributed by which country?
Canada
It has power tools, lights and video for swapping out orbital replacement units so astronauts spacewalk less.
Q 24The station's Elektron unit makes breathable oxygen by doing what?
Electrolysing water
The hydrogen by-product is vented overboard; solid-fuel generators and stored tanks provide backup.
Q 25To limit bone and muscle loss, each ISS crew member must exercise for at least how long every day?
Two hours
The kit includes two treadmills, one nicknamed COLBERT, and the ARED resistance machine.
Q 26Sleeping quarters on the ISS are best described as what?
Person-sized soundproof booths
Each has a sleeping bag, reading lamp and personal storage; the station has seven of them plus three bathrooms and two dining areas.
Q 27Seen from the ground, the sunlit ISS can shine as bright as which planet, around magnitude −4?
Venus
It is the brightest artificial object in the sky, visible as a moving white dot in twilight.
Q 28The ISS's 51.6-degree inclination was chosen so that Soyuz launches from Baikonur would avoid what?
Overflying China
It is the lowest inclination reachable from the 46° N cosmodrome without dropping spent stages on inhabited areas.
Q 29Which crewed vehicle has made the most flights to the ISS?
Soyuz
By 2026 the tally was 73 Soyuz, 52 Dragon, 37 Shuttle and 2 Starliner missions, plus 95 uncrewed Progress freighters.
Q 30Dennis Tito became the first self-funded ISS visitor in 2001 after paying about how much?
$20 million
NASA resisted training him; he flew on Soyuz TM-32 and spent nearly eight days in orbit.