Alan Shepard's Moon golf shots went 24 and 40 yards

Alan Shepard hit two golf balls on the Moon on February 6, 1971, at the end of Apollo 14’s second moonwalk, and they travelled about 24 and 40 yards, not the “miles and miles and miles” he claimed on air.

An avid golfer, Shepard had smuggled a Wilson six-iron head aboard in his spacesuit pocket. At the Fra Mauro landing site he clipped it to the handle of a contingency sample-collection tool, faced the TV camera, dropped a ball and introduced it to viewers back home:

“A little white pellet that’s familiar to millions of Americans.”

Swing by swing

The stiff, pressurised suit forced him to swing one-handed, and it showed.

• Swing 1: topped the ball.
• Swing 2: made contact but sent it only two or three feet sideways. Capcom Fred Haise: “That looked like a slice to me, Al.”
• Swing 3: the ball flew about 24 yards and dropped into a nearby crater.
• Swing 4: a second ball, the “miles and miles” shot, went about 40 yards toward the experiment station.

Not to be outdone, Edgar Mitchell hurled the staff of the Solar Wind Collector experiment like a javelin. It landed in the same crater as Shepard’s first ball. The record survives in pictures: a photo taken from the lunar module’s window shows the “javelin” and a ball in the crater, and another frame catches the second ball as a small white dot in the direction of the experiment site.

The golf ended a record-setting stay: Shepard and Mitchell logged 9 hours 22 minutes outside across two moonwalks and collected 93 pounds of samples. Back home, Shepard gave the original club head to the United States Golf Association, and a replica went to the Smithsonian’s national collection in 1975.