moon shot

noun

variants or moonshot

ˈmün-ˌshät 

plural moon shots or moonshots

1

a

: a spacecraft mission to the moon

And among the nearly endless tasks that had to be completed for the Apollo moon shot, one woman spearheaded a critical engineering project: testing all the small gear the astronauts would take with them to the lunar surface.

—Kathryn Tully

b

: an extremely ambitious project or mission undertaken to achieve a monumental goal

He is leading biology's moon shot; the Human Genome Project, a $3 billion, 15-year effort to pinpoint the location of all 100,000 human genes.

—Paul Hoffman

This month, a group of billionaires … announced a moonshot of their own—a $1 billion joint venture to develop clean energy technology and bring it to market.

—Alan Fleischmann

2

sports : a hit or thrown ball that travels a great distance with a high trajectory

… paused at the plate to admire the second of the three homers—a moon shot that landed a few rows short of a homemade sign in the rightfield bleachers …

—Tim Crothers

White's pass, like his 43-yard touchdown to Tony Hill in the fourth quarter, was a moon shot, a high arching thing that took an hour to come down.

—Paul Zimmerman

Examples of moon shot in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Rodriguez said that restoring sight in James’ left eye through a whole eye transplant was a moon shot from the get-go but that performing the surgery provided other benefits, as well. —Kaitlin Sullivan, NBC News, 9 Nov. 2023

Cedric Mullins hits game-winning home run With one out in the top of the 10th and the ghost runner on base, Mullins stepped up to the plate and launched a moon shot to right field, sending the ball 364 feet and over the wall to give Baltimore a 5-3 lead. —Jordan Mendoza, USA TODAY, 13 Aug. 2023

The tally included a 493-foot moon shot on Friday, the longest home run of his career and in the majors this season. —Sarah Valenzuela, Los Angeles Times, 2 July 2023

Unfortunately, not every Google moon shot leaves Earth orbit. —Ross Koningstein, IEEE Spectrum, 18 Nov. 2014

With just one more game remaining before the start of the playoffs, Aaron Judge, one of the largest players to bat lead-off in baseball’s long history, launched a moon shot for his sixty-second home run of the season, climbing into seventh place in the annals. —Ben McGrath, The New Yorker, 10 Oct. 2022

Instead of muttering meaningless slogans, Mr. Biden and the Democrats could alleviate racial health disparities by protecting the border, backing law enforcement and joining with Republicans to address the addiction crisis in efforts as ambitious as the cancer moon shot and Operation Warp Speed. —Joseph Grogan and Casey B. Mulligan, WSJ, 18 May 2022

An economics professor at University College London, Mazzucato argues that the Reaganite approach to capitalism prevents the next big moon shot—the kind of project so ambitious that only a government can launch it, and whose benefits ripple through the rest of society and the economy. —Ganesh Sitaraman, The New Republic, 29 Apr. 2021

But what is your moon shot like? —Justin Phillips, SFChronicle.com, 10 Aug. 2020

Word History

First Known Use

1949, in the meaning defined at sense 1a