The Moon is 384,400 kilometers away. At highway speed, that is a 160-day road trip. If there was a road.
The Moon is 384,400 kilometers away. That sounds far. It is not. At highway speed, you would get there in 160 days. That is five months of driving. No traffic. No speed limits. Just you and the road. If there was a road. There is not. There is no road to the Moon. There is just space. And space is empty. You would drive off the edge of the atmosphere and immediately fall.
The Apollo missions took 3 days to reach the Moon. They went at 39,000 kilometers per hour. That is 11 kilometers per second. At that speed, the drive to the Moon takes 10 hours. Faster than a flight to Australia. Slower than a blink. The Moon is not that far. It is just that going there is hard. You need 11 kilometers per second of speed. You need 3 million horsepower. You need a rocket.
We have not been back to the Moon since 1972. The last human left. They left footprints. The footprints are still there. The Moon has no wind. No rain. No erosion. The footprints will last 100 million years. We stopped going. We played with toys. We built the internet. We forgot the Moon. But it is still there. 384,400 kilometers away. 160 days by car. 3 days by rocket.
The next person to drive to the Moon will not drive. They will fly. They will go at 39,000 km/h. They will land. They will look back at Earth. They will see a blue marble. They will be the first human to leave Earth in 50 years. The road to the Moon does not exist. But the road is being built. Slowly. Expensively. Carefully.
Because there is no road. The Earth ends at the atmosphere. The Moon is in space. Your car has wings? No. Your car has rockets? No. You need a rocket. A car cannot fly. A car cannot survive vacuum. A car cannot survive reentry. You need a rocket.
3 days. They went at 39,000 km/h. That is 11 km/s. Faster than a bullet. The Saturn V rocket produced 3.4 million kilograms of thrust. It was the most powerful machine ever built. It got us to the Moon in 3 days.
At 8L/100km and $1.50/L, the drive would cost about $4,600. That is cheap. But you need a rocket. The Saturn V used 2,500 tons of fuel. That cost $180 million in 1969. Adjusted for inflation, that is $1.3 billion. A car trip is cheaper. A rocket trip is not.
Yes. NASA's Artemis program plans to land humans on the Moon again in 2025. They will stay longer. They will build a base. They will use the Moon as a stepping stone to Mars. The road to the Moon is being built. It is slow. It is expensive. But it is happening.