"You can access Apollo imagery to very high quality online," Apollo historian and video editor W. Saunders' remastering of archival photos enabled him to locate the second ball that traveled farther, as well as one of the divots in the lunar soil. The location of the first ball Shepard hit has been known for quite some time-it's sitting in a crater next to Mitchell's javelin, about 24 yards from where Shepard stood when he took his swing. Once back on Earth, Shepard donated his makeshift club to the USGA museum and had a reproduction made that is now on display at the Smithsonian. Not to be left out, crewmate Edgar Mitchell used a pole from a solar wind experiment as a javelin, which landed near the first golf ball. He sent the ball soaring out of camera range and declared that it traveled for "miles and miles and miles." And as he had anticipated, the impressive 30-second time of flight perfectly showcased the difference in gravity between the Earth and the Moon. ("Looked like a slice to me, Al," Apollo 13 pilot Fred Haise joked while watching from Mission Control.)īut Shepard nailed his fourth attempt. After two swings that were "more dirt than ball," he made contact with the ball on his third swing, "shanking" it into a nearby crater. His spacesuit was too bulky to use both hands, so he swung the makeshift club with just his right hand. On February 6, Shepard brought out the club and two balls. Once NASA's Technical Services division added some finishing touches, Shepard practiced his golf swing at a course in Houston while wearing his 200-plus-pound spacesuit to prepare.
BALL BOY A DAY IN SPACE PRO
So he paid a pro named Jack Harden at the River Oaks Country Club in Houston to adapt a Wilson Staff 6-iron head so that it could be attached to a collapsible aluminum and Teflon sample collector.
BALL BOY A DAY IN SPACE CRACKED
An avid golfer, Hope cracked a joke about hitting a golf ball on the Moon, and Shepard thought it would be an excellent means of conveying to people watching back on Earth the difference in the strength of gravity.
The idea for Shepard's golfing stunt came out of a 1970 visit by comedian Bob Hope to NASA headquarters in Houston. He narrowly missed being assigned to the famous Apollo 13 mission-NASA's "most successful failure" and the subject of the 1995 Oscar-winning film, Apollo 13 (one of my all-time faves). Instead, Shepard commanded the Apollo 14 mission, which launched on January 31, 1971, and landed on the Moon on February 5.
Alas, he was a grounded after being diagnosed with Ménière's disease, resulting in an unusually high volume of fluid in the inner ear.įurther Reading A deep dive into the Apollo Guidance Computer, and the hack that saved Apollo 14Surgery four years later corrected the problem, and Shepard was cleared for flight. He made his own flight into space one month later, on May 5. Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin famously became the first man in space on April 12, 1961, thanks to repeated postponements of NASA's Mercury mission, but Shepard wasn't far behind. Shepard beat out some fierce competition be chosen for the first American crewed mission into space. (The others were Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, and Deke Slayton.) Eisenhower established NASA in 1959, Shepard was selected as one of the seven Mercury astronauts. He was nearly court-martialed for looping the Chesapeake Bay Bridge during a test flight, but fortunately, his superiors intervened. Shepard's fondness for cheeky irreverence had popped up occasionally during his successful pre-NASA naval career, most notably when he was a test pilot at the Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland. Saunders concluded that the first golf ball Shepard hit traveled roughly 24 yards, while the second golf ball traveled 40 yards. Saunders, who has been working with the United States Golf Association (USGA) to commemorate Shepard's historical feat, announced his findings in a Twitter thread. It seems we now have an answer, thanks to the efforts of imaging specialist Andy Saunders, who digitally enhanced archival images from that mission and used them to estimate the final resting spots of the golf balls. Space enthusiasts have debated for decades just how far that second ball traveled. made space history when he took a few golf swings on the Moon during the Apollo 14 mission, successfully hitting two golf balls across the lunar surface. Fifty years ago this week, NASA astronaut Alan B.