Related: Why is space a vacuum? Planning your route Obviously, it's not possible to walk nonstop for 91 days, so the actual walk around the moon would take much longer. For context, it would take around 334 days to walk nonstop (i.e., not stopping to sleep or eat) around the 24,901-mile (40,075 km) circumference of Earth at this speed, although it is impossible to do so because of the oceans. One of the reasons the Apollo astronauts were so slow on the lunar surface was because they couldn't do this properly due their chunky suits.Īt this new hypothetical max speed, it would take about 91 days to walk the 6,786-mile (10,921 km) circumference of the moon. This pendulum motion created a downward force, which partially compensated for a lack of gravity. The participants pulled off these fast speeds because they were able to freely swing their arms, similar to how humans run on Earth. This is not only more than double the walking speed managed by the Apollo astronauts but also fairly close to the 4.5 mph (7.2 km/h) average maximum walking speed on Earth, according to the researchers. This experiment revealed that the participants were able to walk up to 3.1 mph (5 km/h) before breaking into a run.

To do this, the team got eight participants (three of which were astronauts) to use a treadmill onboard a DC-9 aircraft, which flew special parabolic trajectories on Earth to simulate gravity on the moon for up to 20 seconds at a time. In 2014, a NASA study published in the Journal of Experimental Biology tested how fast humans could walk and run in simulated lunar gravity. If the 'moonwalkers' had sported sleeker suits, they might have found it a lot easier to move and, as a result, picked up the pace. This slow speed was mainly due to their clunky, pressurized spacesuits that were not designed with mobility in mind. Picking up the paceĭuring the Apollo missions, astronauts bounced around the surface at a casual 1.4 mph (2.2 km/h), according to NASA. Theoretically, walking the circumference of the moon could be done faster than previously predicted. However, research from NASA has since suggested that it is possible for humans to maneuver much faster on the moon than the Apollo astronauts did.

How to make portal to the moon