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Alan Shepard’s Balls
Playing golf on the moon
Astronaut Alan Shepard died on July 21, 1998, at the age of 74. “So far I’m the only person to have hit a golf ball on the moon. Probably will be for some time,” he told NASA a few months prior to his death, in February. “What a neat place to whack a golf ball.”
Shepard was the first American in space. He was onboard the Freedom 7 when it took off from Cape Canaveral in Florida on May 5, 1961. Ten years later, he became the fifth man to walk on the surface of the moon and the first one to play golf there.
It was on February 6, 1971 that he made his moon shots. The commander of Apollo 14 stated that he hit “a little white pellet that’s familiar to millions of Americans”. He actually hit two of them with a 6-iron jury-rigged specifically for the exhibition.
It wasn’t the best place to play golf, since it was all sand trap — the moon’s surface is covered with lunar dust.
A live broadcast showed him as he hit the two balls. He bragged that the second traveled for “miles and miles.”
In actuality, an analysis by the U.S. Golf Association (USGA) showed that the first ball only traveled 24 yards while the second went 40 yards. The average male golfer can get a ball to fly over 200 yards on Earth, at six times the gravity found on the moon.
