How long apollo 11 took to reach moon?

The journey divides into two very different phases. The first lasted minutes: a Saturn V climbing through the atmosphere, staging twice and parking the spacecraft in Earth orbit. After a check-out circuit and a half, the third stage reignited for the translunar injection burn, accelerating the stack to roughly 10.8 km/s and committing it to the Moon.

Everything after that was coasting. With the engine silent, the spacecraft climbed against Earth's gravity and steadily lost speed, slowing to a few hundred metres per second near the point where lunar gravity begins to dominate — and then accelerating again as the Moon pulled it in. Lunar orbit insertion came about 76 hours after launch on 19 July, when the service module engine fired on the far side of the Moon, out of contact with Houston.

Three days was the economical answer, not a technical limit. A faster trajectory demands more propellant on departure and, worse, far more on arrival to shed the extra speed. Apollo's free-return profile also offered safety: if the service module engine had failed, the spacecraft would have looped around the Moon and returned to Earth without further burns. Apollo 13 owed its crew's survival to precisely that geometry in April 1970.

Eagle undocked on 20 July and landed at 20:17 UTC, four days and six hours after launch. The surface stay lasted about 21 hours 36 minutes. The return was quicker than the outbound leg, with splashdown in the Pacific on 24 July — a complete mission of roughly eight days and three hours.