The six-iron that went to the moon: Alan Shepard's lunar golf

On 6 February 1971, at the end of Apollo 14’s second moonwalk, Alan Shepard topped a golf shot on live television. He was 384,000 kilometres from the nearest first tee, wearing a pressurised spacesuit and holding a club he had assembled from a rock-collecting tool.

More than half a century later it remains the furthest from home anyone has played the game, and the club sits in the USGA Golf Museum in New Jersey. The story has grown in the telling, and the record is more modest.

The comeback commander

Shepard was born in Derry, New Hampshire, in 1923 and became the first American in space when he flew Freedom 7 on 5 May 1961. Then his career stalled. In 1963 he was diagnosed with Ménière’s disease, an inner-ear condition that causes severe dizziness, and he was grounded for years. Surgery in 1968 fixed it, and in May 1969 he was restored to full flight status.

Less than two years later he was commanding Apollo 14, the mission sent to the Fra Mauro highlands that Apollo 13 never reached. Alongside lunar module pilot Edgar Mitchell, with Stuart Roosa orbiting above in the command module, Shepard became the fifth person to walk on the moon and, at 47, the oldest. He was the only one of the original Mercury Seven to get there.

A club in a spacesuit pocket

The idea, according to an Associated Press account published for the 50th anniversary, was planted by Bob Hope, who took his golf clubs everywhere and brought them along on a visit to the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston about a year before the flight.

Shepard turned the joke into hardware. The USGA says the head was a Wilson Staff Dyna-Power 6-iron, fitted by Jack Harden Jr., the club professional at River Oaks Country Club in Houston, so it could attach to the collapsible handle of a tool designed for scooping up lunar samples. The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum identifies the handle as that of the contingency sample return device, and says Shepard carried the improvised club in his spacesuit pocket. The balls were River Oaks range balls marked as Harden’s property, according to the AP.

Shepard also had a plan for when to use it. He would wait until the very end of the second moonwalk, once the science was done, so nobody could accuse him of putting fun before work.

Four swings at Fra Mauro

NASA’s Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, which pairs the mission transcript with later commentary, lets you follow the round almost swing by swing. With the TV camera rolling and the moonwalk wrapping up, Shepard dropped a ball and went to work one-handed, because the stiff suit made a proper two-handed turn impossible.

The first swing topped the ball and buried it in the dust. The second moved it a couple of feet. Shepard likened the surface to one big bunker.

The third swing connected and sent the ball off-camera. In Houston, the capsule communicator, fellow astronaut Fred Haise, suggested it looked like a slice. Shepard dropped a second ball, made contact again, and gave the moon its first piece of golfing exaggeration, announcing that it had gone “miles and miles and miles.”

Mitchell picked up the staff from the solar wind experiment and threw it like a javelin, and the journal notes that his throw travelled slightly further than Shepard’s first ball, the two landing in the same crater.

NASA’s catalogue describes this Apollo 14 frame as showing the javelin and a golf ball from the second moonwalk. Photo: NASA, via U.S. National Archives / Wikimedia Commons, public domain

About 24 yards, then about 40

For 50 years nobody knew how far the balls went. Shepard’s “miles” was clearly a joke: in one-sixth gravity a well-struck ball would fly a long way, but nothing about a one-armed swing in a spacesuit was well struck.

In 2021, for the 50th anniversary, the USGA worked with imaging specialist Andy Saunders, who has spent years restoring Apollo imagery. Using high-resolution scans of the mission film, image enhancement and pictures of the landing site taken from orbit by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, he located both balls. The first travelled about 24 yards and the second about 40 yards.

That is a modest wedge for most club golfers.

Where the club lives now

The balls are still on the moon. According to the AP, Shepard handed the original head to the USGA at a ceremony during the 1974 U.S. Open, and it remains in the USGA Golf Museum. The Smithsonian holds a replica, which its catalogue says Shepard presented to the national collection in 1975.

Shepard died in Pebble Beach, California, in July 1998. His Apollo 14 crew brought back around 90 pounds of moon rock.

Jack Nicklaus, speaking to the AP in 2021, said he thought it was unique for the game that an astronaut cared about golf enough to take a club to the moon.

Sources

• USGA: Shepard’s moon club and the 50th-anniversary distance analysis
• NASA Apollo Lunar Surface Journal: Apollo 14 EVA-2 closeout
• NASA: Apollo 14 mission overview
• Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum: Head, golf club, Apollo 14, replica
• Associated Press via WSLS: Out of this world, Shepard puts golf on moon 50 years ago
• Space.com: How far did Alan Shepard’s golf balls go on the moon?
• Wikipedia: Alan Shepard