How many Apollo missions successfully landed astronauts on the Moon?

How to get close to this number

Bracket it from the programme dates. The landings ran from 1969 to 1972, roughly three years, at a pace of about two flights a year — and not every flight was a landing. That arithmetic lands you within one of the answer, and it is far more reliable than trying to recall a list of mission numbers.

Most people guess lower than the truth, and the reason is that public memory has compressed the programme into a single event. The first landing is the one everyone knows; the later ones happened after the world had stopped watching, which is itself the most striking fact about the programme. Fame is a terrible proxy for frequency, and that is a bias worth noticing in any question about historic events.

The mission numbers do not line up with the landing count, which is the trap here. As the explanation says, one flight was intended as a landing and became a rescue instead, and several earlier Apollo missions flew without attempting a descent at all. Counting missions in a programme and counting successful outcomes are different questions, and the phrasing of this one is deliberately specific.