• Question: How long does it take to get to the moon?

    Asked by crunchiejelly to Amy, Drew, Julia, Kimberley, Sara on 15 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by lisarose.
    • Photo: Amy MacQueen

      Amy MacQueen answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      Hi crunchiejelly! I think someone asked this in chat today – apparently the Apollo 11 astronauts took 3 days – and Apollo13 guys were a bit quicker doing the whole round trip between the moon and earth in just under 6 days.

      I guess it might be quicker these days…although it will depend on the traffic and the roadworks in the space highway…

      also it depends how you go – do you have a spaceship or do you have another means of transport?! 🙂

    • Photo: Julia Griffen

      Julia Griffen answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      well the moon is about 240000 miles away… so travel 240000 miles and hour…and well get there in an hour 🙂

      I think amy’s answers are realistic tho 😛

    • Photo: Kimberley Bryon

      Kimberley Bryon answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      I think that Sara will definitely know the answer to this. Amy’s answer sounds right though

    • Photo: Sara Imari Walker

      Sara Imari Walker answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      Hey crunchiejelly! Hmmm, this one could be interesting to think about! The moon, when it is closest to Earth is about 362, 570 km away. How fast do you walk? According to wikipedia the walking speed of an average person is 1 km/hr. So to get an estimate on how long it would take you or me to walk to the moon (pending we had appropriate space attire and some kind of space elevator or walkway to follow) – well that would take 362, 570 hours – that’s over 41 years!! (not stops!) I don’t know about you but I am not that patient, even for a trip to the moon. Even if we could take a race car and go 100 km/hr the whole way there it would still take about 5 months. That’s one heck of a road trip!!

      That’s just to give us a feel for the distance to the moon. Amy is right on – the Apollo 11 astronauts did the trip in about 3 days (that means they were traveling about 5,000 km/hr on the way there! That’s over 5x the speed of a normal jet plane. Nowadays we probably could do much better than that even. The shortest time it has taken any man-made object to get to the moon was the voyage of the New Horizons Pluto mission. This unmanned mission flew by the moon (not even for photos!), and took only 8 hours and 35 minutes to get there. How fast was New Horizons flying? A whopping 58,000 km/hr!! Now THAT is fast! Now New Horizons was a small satellite but I think based on these numbers its reasonable to think that maybe it might take humans 1 day to get to the moon if we really wanted to. Can you imagine that? One morning you wake up. The next morning you are on the moon! Now that would be cool.

    • Photo: Drew Rae

      Drew Rae answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      Crunchie Jelly, now that you’ve had the serious answers … One of the ideas that has been speculated upon for space travel is we send a cloning machine, and transmit your dna and consciousness to it.

      Time to do the research and set up base camp – at least 50 years, possibly far in the distant future. Time for you to make the trip – a few seconds via laser modem.

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