Astronaut Typing Test

Type an astronaut's own account of his 1963 flight and see your words per minute.

Type each word and press space after it. The clock starts on your first key. The MA-9 flight marked the conclusion to the United States' first manned space-flight program. From their initiation into the program in 1959, the seven Mercury astronauts participated as a specialist team, and their combined experiences, both in space and on the ground, constitute a valuable contribution to the nation's manned space-flight capability. The launch checkout activities constitute one of the most valuable portions of this experience, and the MA-9 flight demonstrated once again how critical this period is both to the preparation of the spacecraft and the pilot. The sensations and experiences of the flight were generally similar to those reported by the pilots of previous flights with the exception that better dark adaptation was obtained and therefore more dim light phenomena could be seen. During the MA-9 flight, the zodiacal light and what may have been the daytime airglow were observed for the first time.
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1 minute of typing. Words per minute is correct characters divided by five; accuracy is correct keystrokes out of all keystrokes.

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How it works

This astronaut typing test has twelve passages from a flight report of 1963 by the pilot of the last Mercury mission. Names, dates and figures, such as May 15, 1963 and 42,000 feet, bring in capitals and the number row.

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Practice passages, not another site's test

These are practice passages cut from a public report; they are not the test from any other site. If a course or another site sets you a passage about astronauts, expect different wording there.

What slows the fingers here

Abbreviations in capitals, such as BECO, SECO and ASCS. Hyphenated terms: MA-9, zero-g, fly-by-wire. Figures with commas and decimal points: 95,000 feet, 0.05g. Pick No timer under Test length to type a passage to its last period; with a clock, the run also ends when the passage does.

Questions and answers

Where do the astronaut passages come from?

From one chapter of Mercury Project Summary, a United States space agency report of October 1963: the flight report of L. Gordon Cooper, Jr., on his mission of May 15 and 16, 1963. A United States government work is free of copyright there.

Is this the astronaut passage from another typing test?

No. This page reproduces no other site's test. Its twelve passages were cut for it from the 1963 report, so the wording differs from any passage you were set elsewhere.

How long is each passage?

From 128 words, A Locomotive in India and BECO and SECO, to 207, Starting From Scratch. Seven of the twelve hold dates or figures, and ten name a person or a place.

All 12 passages

Short: under 150 words 4

  • A Locomotive in India Dust on a road, a steam locomotive and the wake of a boat. Two place names carry hyphens: Arizona-West Texas and Burma-India.
  • BECO and SECO The two engine cutoffs of the launch, each with its abbreviation in capitals in parentheses. Three astronauts are named in full.
  • The Flights Before Faith 7 Cooper looks back at the five flights before his own. Aurora 7 and USS Kearsarge are in italics in the report and plain here.
  • The Last Mercury Flight The chapter's own summary of the flight. MA-9 is typed with a hyphen, three times, and 1959 is the one date.

Medium: 150 to 189 words 5

  • The Booster Out the Window The first minutes in orbit, with the booster still in sight. Hyphens in 1-g and zero-g, and a capital D to end Atlas 130D.
  • The Earth by Day Colors of the ground seen from orbit: Tibetan lakes, the Arabian desert, the Sahara. The report prints predominately and copper-sulphate, and a sentence ends on the second period of U.S.
  • Manual Retrofire How each pilot handled retrofire, told by first names: Wally, John, Scott. Hyphens in low-torque and fly-by-wire.
  • Two Countdowns in May A launch called off on May 14 and the real one on May 15, 1963. Quotation marks around go, and the passage's one exclamation mark after And it was.
  • Weightless in the Seat What weightlessness is like strapped into a seat. Scott Carpenter is the one name, and dropped sits inside quotation marks.
Show all 12 passages (3 more)

Long: 190 words or more 3

  • City Lights and Fireflies The night side: the lights of Perth, Australia, the glow of Shanghai, and the particles the pilots called John Glenn's fireflies. Two semicolons in the first two sentences.
  • Reentry and the Drogue Parachute Reentry flown by hand. Figures with commas, 95,000, 50,000 and 42,000 feet, and 0.05g twice with its decimal point.
  • Starting From Scratch The seven astronauts meet at Langley Field, Virginia, in April of 1959. Capitals run through it: NASA Space Task Group, Project Mercury Astronauts.

How this list was compiled: Twelve passages cut from one chapter of one report: chapter 20, "Astronaut's Summary Flight Report", by L. Gordon Cooper, Jr., Astronaut, NASA Manned Spacecraft Center, pages 349 to 358 of Mercury Project Summary Including Results of the Fourth Manned Orbital Flight, May 15 and 16, 1963, NASA SP-45 (Washington, D.C.: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Office of Scientific and Technical Information, October 1963). The scan read is the one on the agency's Technical Reports Server, https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19630012071 (read 2026-10-02). That record files the report as a Special Publication, number NASA-SP-45, dated October 1963, with the copyright determination GOV_PUBLIC_USE_PERMITTED and no third-party material, and the chapter's byline shows it was written by a serving astronaut of the agency as part of his work, which makes it a work of the United States government (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_works_by_the_federal_government_of_the_United_States, checked 2026-10-02). Each passage is an unbroken run of whole sentences from one section of the chapter, 128 to 207 words long. The words were taken from the scan's text layer, which is rough, and then every passage was read against a picture of its printed page, so each name, date and figure stands as the report prints it. Changes: lines were joined, the dash the report prints in MA-9, 1-g and zero-g is a hyphen, quotation marks are straight, and the italics of Aurora 7 and USS Kearsarge are plain. Sentences with a fraction or a degree sign were left out, because a plain keyboard has neither. Characters and words were counted, characters divided by five give standard words (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute), no word is longer than 30 characters, and every word a note quotes is in its passage. The seven astronauts of the program, five of whom are named in the passages and a sixth of whom wrote them, have all died; the last was John Glenn, in 2016 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_Seven, checked 2026-10-02). Passage names and notes are this page's own. Licence: Public domain in the United States: a work of the United States government, published in 1963 (https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19630012071). The passage names, the notes, the cuts and the counts are own work.

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