Login to reply the answers Post How NASA Tracked Apollo 11 to the Moon and Back with 1960s Tech By Doris Elin Urrutia 18 July 2019 One nation's arrival to the moon was in reality a global, far-reaching endeavor. Hi— I received an email regarding this question, so here goes… There were no such things as ‘satellite networks’ in those days, for the most part. How' they do that? Apollo 11 took just shy of 76 hours to reach lunar orbit. The time varies depending on where the Moon is at the time and where on the Moon we wish to visit. The first mission to the Moon was Apollo 8 on December 21, 1968. The moment Apollo left Earth's atmosphere it was doomed. During Apollo 11's lunar landing, Neil Armstrong had to manually fly the lunar module over West Crater and portions of the boulder field to locate a safe landing site. The others were in between. The LM had two means of determining its altitude. The Apollo program, also known as Project Apollo, was the third United States human spaceflight program carried out by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which succeeded in landing the first men on the Moon from 1969 to 1972. You are all wrong. Most of the rocks collected on Apollo 11 are believed to be material that was ejected when West Crater formed about 100 million years ago. Apollo 17 took 86 hours. The earth Orbits the sun (allegedly) at 67,000 mph. Apollo 11 did it in 6. I am not going to spend much time answering this because it there are lots of great information sites on the internet. Practically speaking, they didn’t exist. How far did the Apollo 11 mission travel in 1969? OPOQ; How did NASA know how far away the moon was before Apollo-11? It was first conceived during Dwight D. Eisenhower's administration as a three-person spacecraft to follow the one-person Project Mercury, … Hmm, the moon is 238,900 miles away; at 24,000 per hour the would take roughly over 10 hours.