This is How Long it Would Take to Walk to the Moon

As humans, we are curious creatures. Something inside us yearns to reach out and explore the depths, the areas of the universe we don’t quite understand. We travel in submarines to the deepest trenches on earth, where life still exists in the pitch, cold black. And we take rockets and rovers to space to explore the pitted moon and the butterscotch dunes of mars. And if you are one of the ones interested in traveling to space, you are a unique person in the minority. Continue reading to discover your most common questions, including how long it would take to walk to the moon.

How Far Away is the Moon?

The moon is 238,855 miles away from earth, which is the length of about 30 earths. They may not look that far apart when you see illustrations of the earth and moon side by side, but they are a great distance from each other. It’s incredible to know that something that far away can still be seen when you look up at the sky. And to further know that the moon is smaller than the United States; it’s about a quarter the size of the earth. The moon does not produce its own light. We can only see it because the sun’s light reflects back to our eyes.

How Long Does It Take to Get to the Moon in a Spaceship?

It takes around three days to travel to the moon in a spacecraft. However, the specific distance and time depend on the rocket’s path. In 1969, the Apollo 11 mission took four days, six hours, and 45 minutes to reach the moon. Their spacecraft held a three-man crew and traveled 24,791 miles per hour.

How Long Would It Take you to Walk to the Moon?

There are many factors that go into calculating how long it would take to walk to the moon. For one, there is no fixed distance between the earth and the moon as they are in orbit. And the orbit is not perfectly circular, so the distance can be as short as 238,855 miles or as long as 252,088. And assuming you could build a bridge from the earth to the moon, you would have to account for gravity, meaning you would actually be climbing a good distance.

But all the equations and technicalities aside, this is, after all, hypothetical. The average human can walk an average of three miles per hour. If you walk three miles per hour 24/7, you could reach the moon in 9.5 years. If you take time to rest and only walk 14 hours a day, it would take you almost 14 years to walk to the moon. A return trip would put you at a total of between 19 years and 28 years to walk to the moon and back. A spiral staircase ascending and a slide descending would make things much faster, but that’s a whole lot more math.

How Long Would It Take You to Walk Around the Moon?

Now let’s say you’re already on the moon; how long would it take you to walk all the way around it? The moon has a circumference of 6,786 miles. If you walked nonstop around 4.5 miles per hour, it would take you about 91 days to walk around the moon. Realistically, walking nonstop is not possible. Plus, there are many other considerations, such as the moon’s topography and having to bring oxygen with you. But logistically, it could actually be done if you brought a support vehicle with you and stopped for proper rest. With a more realistic approach, someone could walk around the moon in about a year.

How Long Would it Take to Walk to Mars?

Mars is 117 million miles away from earth. If you were to walk nonstop at a rate of five miles per hour, it would take you around 4,000 years.

How Long Would It Take To Get To the Sun?

The answer this question, of course, depends on how you are traveling. In a modern airplane traveling around 500 miles per hour, it is an estimated travel time of 19 years from our planet to get to the sun! That is a long travel time, but considering driving in a car, would take 177 years!

Taking the airplane option, the trip would at least be somewhat manageable and something that a human could live through and still be old enough to tell the tale. And probably make the trip back!

In science fiction movies, space travelers often are frozen in a type of cryogenic sleep that allows astronauts to skip the unwanted boredom of such a long trip.

Now, if our interspace travelers could match the speed of light, that would make the trip much shorter. Light from the sun takes a whole 8.3 minutes to reach our atmosphere here on earth.