Fifty years ago this week, NASA astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr. space history when he made a few wave swings on the moon during the Apollo 14 mission and successfully hit two golf balls across the lunar surface. Space aficionados have debated how far that second ball traveled for decades. It seems we now have an answer, thanks to the efforts of imaging specialist Andy Saunders, who digitally enhanced archive footage from that mission and used it to estimate the final resting places of the golf balls.
Saunders, who has partnered with the United States Golf Association (USGA) to commemorate Shepard’s historic achievement, announced his findings in a Twitter thread. Saunders concluded that the first golf ball Shepard hit traveled about 24 meters, while the second golf ball traveled 40 meters.
Shepard’s penchant for brutal irreverence had occasionally emerged during his successful naval career before NASA, most notably while serving as a test pilot on the Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland. He was almost court-martialed for looping the Chesapeake Bay Bridge on a test flight, but luckily his superiors intervened. When President Dwight D. Eisenhower founded NASA in 1959, Shepard was selected as one of seven Mercury astronauts. (The others were Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, and Deke Slayton.)
Shepard defeated a fierce competition and was chosen for the first American manned mission in space. Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space on April 25, 1961, thanks to repeated postponements of NASA’s Mercury mission, but Shepard was not far behind. A month later, on May 5, he made his own flight to space. Unfortunately, he was grounded after being diagnosed with Ménière’s disease, which resulted in an unusually high volume of fluid in the inner ear.
An operation four years later resolved the problem, and Shepard was cleared for the flight. 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 favorites). Instead, Shepard commanded the Apollo 14 mission, which launched January 31, 1971 and landed on the Moon on February 5.
To the moon!
The idea for Shepard’s golf stunt came from a 1970 visit by comedian Bob Hope to NASA headquarters in Houston. An avid golfer, Hope joked about hitting a golf ball on the moon, and Shepard thought it would be an excellent means of conveying the difference in gravity to people looking back to Earth. So he paid a professional named Jack Harden of the River Oaks Country Club in Houston to modify a Wilson Staff 6-iron head so that it could be attached to a folding aluminum and Teflon sample collector. After adding some finishing touches to NASA’s Technical Services division, Shepard practiced his golf swing on a course in Houston while wearing his 200-pound spacesuit to prepare.
Most popular stories describe Shepard as “smuggling” two balls and a golf club into the spacecraft, but a later interview with Shepard said that was not the case. The astronaut took the idea past then NASA director Bob Gilruth, who initially opposed but conceded when Shepard laid out the precise details. Shepard also assured Gilruth that the stunt would only be performed if all official reconnaissance duties were completed and only if the mission had gone smoothly.
On February 6, Shepard brought out the club and two balls. His spacesuit was too bulky to use both hands, so he swung the makeshift bat with only his right hand. After two swings that were “more dirty than a ball,” he made contact with the ball on his third swing and “shot” it into a nearby crater. (“It seemed like a slice, Al,” Apollo 13 pilot Fred Haise joked while watching from Mission Control.)
But Shepard passed his fourth attempt. He sent the ball out of range of the camera, stating that he was running “miles and miles and miles”. And as he expected, the impressive flight time of 30 seconds perfectly showed the difference in gravity between the Earth and the Moon. Not to mention, crew member Edgar Mitchell used a pole from a solar wind experiment as a spear that landed on the first golf ball. Back on Earth, Shepard donated his makeshift club to the USGA Museum and commissioned a reproduction that is now on display at the Smithsonian.
The location of the first ball Shepard hit has been known for quite some time – it’s in a crater next to Mitchell’s spear, about 24 yards from where Shepard was standing when he made his swing. Saunders’ rearrangement of archive photos allowed him to locate the second ball that traveled on, as well as one of the divots in the lunar soil.
“You can access very high quality Apollo images online,” Apollo historian and video editor W. David Woods told Ars. “These photos were taken at 55 millimeters, the negatives and transparencies, at 55 millimeters per side. The scans they took on them and which are available online are 11,000 pixels wide. So they’re huge, huge photos that you can really get into. dive in, if you have experience with image processing. “
Image tricks
Saunders has that expertise. He drew on recent high-resolution scans of the original flight movie and also used a technique known as substacking, among other things.
“Some things were shot with 16-millimeter film,” Woods said. “Each individual image is quite small and grainy. But when you stack them on top of each other, you cancel the grain, cancel the noise, and leave the images inherent in all those frames. A trick that astronomers use, where they are very take many pictures of a part of the night sky. They neutralize the noise by stacking the images in the same way. “
The Apollo 14 crew had taken a series of photos from the lunar module window to capture the scene for posterity, which Saunders had stitched together into a single panorama. According to Saunders, given the known location of the TV camera, it was possible to identify Shepard’s bootprints, showing his point of view for his first two (unsuccessful) attempts. Using a known scale of images taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, he was then able to measure the point between the divot and the second golf ball to make his estimate for 40 yards.
Saunders, whose upcoming book is titled Apollo Remastered, estimates that a professional US Open golfer like Bryson DeChambeau could theoretically hit a ball up to 3.41 miles on the moon, with a hang time of 1 minute and 22 seconds – much farther (and longer) than Shepard’s performance . As he told the BBC:
Unfortunately, even the impressive second shot could hardly be described as “miles and miles and miles,” but this was of course only considered a light-hearted exaggeration. The moon is basically one gigantic, uninhibited, rock-strewn bunker. The pressurized suits severely limited movement, and because of the visors of their helmets, they had trouble even seeing their feet. I challenged any club golfer to go to their local golf course and try to hit a six-iron, one-handed, a quarter out of an uninhibited bunker. Then imagine that you are fully clothed, wearing a helmet and wearing thick gloves. Also remember that there was little gravity to pull the clubhead towards the ball. The fact that Shepard even made contact and got the ball in the air is extremely impressive.
And of course, the astronaut’s legacy as the first human to play golf on the moon remains safe.