Walking to the Moon

The Moon sits an average of 238,855 miles from Earth — "average" because its orbit is elliptical, not circular, so the real distance drifts between about 225,600 miles at its closest approach and 252,000 miles at its farthest. Use the average, run it through this site's standard conversion, and you get somewhere around 525.5 million steps. For comparison, that's more than nine times the steps in a full lap of the Earth's equator.

There's an obvious problem with all of this, which is that there is no road to the Moon, no surface to walk on for the roughly 238,855-mile middle stretch, and no breathable atmosphere for the vast majority of the trip. This page exists purely as a unit conversion exercise — the kind of number that's fun to sit with precisely because it's completely impossible to attempt.

The 9.1-year estimate assumes something no human body could sustain: 3 miles per hour, 24 hours a day, with no sleep, no rest days, and — again — a flat, walkable surface spanning almost a quarter million miles of open space. A more realistic 8-hours-a-day walking pace would stretch that same distance out closer to 27 years. NASA's real spacecraft, unsurprisingly, cover this distance considerably faster: the Apollo missions took roughly three days to reach the Moon, traveling at speeds no human on foot could get within several orders of magnitude of matching.

A useful way to picture the distance: if Earth were shrunk to the size of a basketball, the Moon would be a tennis ball sitting about 23 feet 9 inches away — far enough that the two objects rarely fit in the same photograph without a very wide lens. Multiply that gap back up to real scale, and you get a distance that light itself — the fastest thing in the universe — takes about 1.3 seconds to cross. Your feet, by contrast, would need the better part of a decade.

The Moon is also, very slowly, walking away from us — its orbit widens by about 3.8 centimeters a year as it drifts from Earth, a measurement precise enough to be tracked using laser reflectors astronauts left on the lunar surface during the Apollo missions. It's a small enough drift that it won't meaningfully change this page's numbers in your lifetime, but it does mean the exact distance you'd be "walking" creeps up, imperceptibly, every year.

If 525.5 million steps feels like a lot to process, it's meant to. Somewhere down at the bottom of that number is the actual, walkable distance from your house to wherever you're having dinner tonight — which this site can also calculate, considerably faster than nine years.

Something within walking distance? Calculate your own route →