Space Records

Question: As of 2016, only one astronaut has made eight flights into space.

Answer: No one has made eight flights into space. Two American astronauts, Jerry Ross and Franklin Chiang-Díaz, flew into space seven times.

Question: Who was the first woman in space?

Answer: Valentina Tereshkova went into orbit on Vostok 6 on June 16, 1963.

Question: How long was the longest spaceflight any astronaut or cosmonaut has ever done?

Answer: Russian cosmonaut and doctor Valery Polyakov spent 438 days in space from January 8, 1994, to March 22, 1995, on board the Mir space station.

Question: What unusual event happened to Soviet cosmonauts Sergei Krikalev and Aleksandr Volkov when they stayed aboard the space station Mir in 1991?

Answer: Krikalev and Volkov were in space when the Soviet Union dissolved on December 26, 1991. They returned as Russian citizens and have been dubbed “the last citizens of the U.S.S.R.”

Question: Mark Zuckerberg was the first repeat space tourist.

Answer: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg never went into space. However, former Microsoft executive Charles Simonyi paid for two trips into space and was the only one to do so.

Question: An Italian astronaut holds the record for longest spaceflight by a woman.

Answer: Samantha Cristoforetti of the European Space Agency spent almost 200 days on the International Space Station from November 2014 to June 2015.

Question: The longest space walk was about…

Answer: The longest space walk was 8 hours and 56 minutes, done by American astronauts Susan Helms and James Voss on March 11, 2001, when they made room for a temporary storage room on the International Space Station.

Question: The 1997 space shuttle flights STS-83 and STS-94 had the exact same crew.

Answer: After STS-83 was cut short because of a fuel cell problem almost 4 days into a planned 16-day mission, NASA re-flew the mission with the exact same crew and payload three months later.

Question: Who was the only person to go to the Moon twice?

Answer: James Lovell went to the Moon twice, on Apollo 8 in 1968 and Apollo 13 in 1970. However, he never set foot on the Moon. Apollo 8 went around the Moon, and he was supposed to land in Apollo 13, but an explosion in the spacecraft’s oxygen tank aborted the landing, so he flew around again.

Question: What claim to fame did Alan Shepard achieve on Apollo 14?

Answer: Alan Shepard was the first to play golf on another world. Using a makeshift club that he had smuggled on board, on February 6, 1971, he hit a golf ball with a one-handed swing. “Miles and miles and miles,” he said. (He later estimated the ball went about 200 yards.)