The Short Answer
For the crewed Apollo missions, the trip to the Moon took about three days. But that’s only one answer, because the real time depends entirely on how you travel. The fastest spacecraft ever to pass the Moon did it in under nine hours, while some clever fuel-saving probes have taken well over a year to get there. Same destination, wildly different journeys.
The Moon sits an average of about 384,400 kilometres away, roughly 240,000 miles. That’s a fixed distance you can’t cheat, so what changes the travel time isn’t the gap itself but how much speed you’re willing to spend, and what you plan to do when you arrive. Let’s break down why the same trip can take three days or thirteen months.
The Classic Answer: Around Three Days
When most people picture going to the Moon, they’re picturing Apollo, and that’s the three-day figure. Apollo 11 lifted off on July 16, 1969, slipped into orbit around the Moon roughly three days later, and touched down on July 20. The other crewed landings followed a similar timeline.
Three days was a deliberate balance. NASA could have gone faster by burning more fuel, but every extra kilogram of propellant is weight you have to haul off the launch pad in the first place. The Apollo route, a direct burn out of Earth orbit followed by a long coast, was a sweet spot between speed, safety, and the sheer cost of lifting fuel. The astronauts spent most of those three days simply gliding through the void, letting Earth’s and the Moon’s gravity do much of the work. It’s the same distance today’s crews will cover, and our breakdown of the Artemis II trajectory shows how NASA is routing its next astronauts on a comparable multi-day path.
The Fastest Trip: Under Nine Hours
Now here’s the record-breaker. NASA’s New Horizons probe, launched in 2006 on its way to Pluto, crossed the Moon’s orbit in just about eight and a half hours.
So why could it do in hours what took Apollo three days? Two reasons. First, New Horizons was flung off Earth at a blistering speed, faster than any spacecraft before it, because it needed that momentum for its decades-long journey to the outer solar system. Second, and this is the crucial part, it never stopped. It blew straight past the Moon without slowing down, because the Moon wasn’t its destination at all. Apollo, by contrast, had to gently ease into lunar orbit and land, which means arriving slowly and carefully rather than screaming past. Getting somewhere fast is easy. Getting there fast and actually stopping is the hard part.
The Scenic Route: Weeks to Over a Year
At the opposite end sit the missions that take the long way round on purpose. Instead of a powerful direct burn, some spacecraft use gentle, ultra-efficient trajectories that sip fuel and let gravity do almost all the driving.
Europe’s SMART-1 probe is the classic example. Powered by a whisper-quiet ion engine, it slowly spiralled outward from Earth in ever-widening loops and took around thirteen months to reach the Moon. More recent missions have landed somewhere in between. Israel’s Beresheet lander took roughly seven weeks, gradually stretching its orbit until the Moon caught it, and NASA’s tiny CAPSTONE satellite followed a winding, low-energy path that lasted about four and a half months. These routes are far slower, but they’re dramatically cheaper on fuel, which matters enormously for small robotic missions on tight budgets.
Why the Same Distance Takes Such Different Times
So what’s really going on here comes down to three choices. The first is how much fuel you’re willing to spend, since more thrust means a faster trip but a heavier, costlier rocket. The second is the kind of engine you use, because a powerful chemical rocket gets you there quickly while a gentle ion drive trades speed for extraordinary efficiency. And the third is what you intend to do on arrival, since flying past at full tilt is far quicker than braking into orbit or setting down softly on the surface.
It’s worth remembering just how close the Moon is in cosmic terms, though. Light itself makes the crossing in only about 1.3 seconds, which is why a radio call between Earth and the Moon has that faint but noticeable delay. For a sense of just how special and near our companion really is, our piece on what makes our Moon so special is a good companion read, and the samples those Apollo crews hauled back are covered in what the Apollo Moon rocks actually told us.
So the honest answer to how long it takes to get to the Moon is, it depends. Three days if you’re an astronaut in a hurry with fuel to burn. Under nine hours if you’re a probe blazing past without stopping. And more than a year if you’re taking the slow, thrifty, gravity-assisted scenic route. For more on our nearest neighbour and the missions heading back there, NASA’s Moon page is the place to keep exploring.
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