Joe is Vanguard's global chief economist and head of Vanguard Investment Strategy Group. He's also a member of the senior portfolio management team in Vanguard Fixed Income Group.
Apollo missions took about three days to reach the moon. But the quickest trip to the moon was the New Horizons probe, which zipped past the moon in just 8 hours 35 minutes on its way to Pluto. However, the spacecraft didn't even slow down or approach lunar orbit. Tidal forces.
It took Apollo 11, that's the spaceship that carried Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin to the moon in 1969, 4 days 6 hours and 45 minutes to get to the moon. They took off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 1:32 pm on 7/16/1969, and the lunar module landed on the moon at 8:17 pm on 7/20/1969.he moon is about 220,000 kilometers from the Earth. You do the math. (The number I am getting in my head is a little less than one kilometer per second, or about 3,000 km/h, or about 2,000 mi/h). I think that the Chinese are planning on repeating this particular experiment. We will see what they come up with.