Fifty years ago this week, NASA astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr. made space history when he took a few golf swings to the moon during the Apollo 14 mission, successfully hitting two golf balls on the lunar surface. Space enthusiasts have been debating for decades how far that second ball has gone. Looks like we now have the answer, thanks to the efforts of imaging expert Andy Sanders, who digitally augmented archival images from that mission and used them to estimate the final resting place of a golf ball.
Saunders, working with the United States Golf Association (USGA) in memory of Shendard’s historic feats, Announced His findings in the Twitter thread. Saunders concluded that the first golf ball, Shepard, traveled about 24 yards, while the second golf ball traveled 40 yards.
Shepard’s fondness for sticky opacity was occasional during his previously successful successful NASA career, especially when he was a test pilot at the Naval Air Station Patscent River in Maryland. He was almost court-martialled for looping the Chesapeake Bay Bridge during a test flight, but luckily, his superiors intervened. When President Dwight D. Eisenhower founded NASA in 1959, Shepard was selected as one of the seven Mercury astronauts. (Others were Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grisham, Vally Lee Shira and DK Slaton.)
Shepard gave some of the fiercest competitions selected for the first American crew mission in space. Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin famously became the first man in space on April 25, 1961 for repeatedly postponing NASA’s Mercury mission, but Shepard was not far behind. A month later he took his flight into space on May th, alas, after being diagnosed with Manier’s disease, which resulted in an abnormal amount of fluid in the inner ear.
Four years after surgery the problem improved, and Shepard was cleared for flight. The famous Apollo 13 mission – assigned to the subject of NASA’s “most successful failure” and the 1995 sc-winning film, was briefly missed. Apollo 13 (One of my all time loss) Instead, Shepard ordered the Apollo 14 mission, which began on January 31, 1971 and landed on the moon on February 5.
To the moon!
The idea for Shepard’s golfing stunt came from a 1970 visit by comedian Bob Hope to NASA headquarters in Houston. An avid golfer, Hope teased the joke of hitting a golf ball on the moon, and Shepard thought it would be an excellent way to reach people who see the difference in the force of gravity on Earth. So he paid a pro named Jack Harden at the River Oaks Country Club in Houston to accept the 6-iron head of the Wilson staff so he could join a collector of compressed aluminum and Teflon specimens. Once NASA’s technical services department added some final touches, Shepard practiced his golf swing on a course in Houston while preparing his 200-plus-pound spacesuit.
Most popular accounts describe Shepard as “smuggling” two balls and a golf club on a spacecraft, but that was not the case, according to a later interview with Shepard. The astronaut came up with the idea of then-NASA director Bob Gilruth, which was initially opposed but Shepard responded again after leaking certain details. Shepard also assured Gilruth that the stunt would be performed only after all official research work had been completed and only if the mission went off without a hitch.
On 6 February Shepard brought out the club and two balls. His spacesuit was too large to use both hands, so he just swung the temporary club with his right hand. After two swings with more dirt than the ball, he made contact with the ball on his third swing, “shaking” it into a nearby pit. (“Al, I felt like a piece” Apollo 13 pilot Fred Hayes joked as he watched from Mission Control.)
But Shepard nailed his fourth attempt. He sent the ball beyond the range of the camera and announced that he was traveling “miles and miles and miles.” And as expected, the impressive 30-second time of flight perfectly demonstrated the difference in gravity between Earth and the Moon. Not to be outdone, Crumate Edgar Mitchell used one of the poles of the solar wind experiment as a javelin, approaching the first golf ball. Once on Earth, Shepard donated and reproduced his makeshift club at the USG Museum, which is now on display in the Smithsonian.
The location of the first ball Shepard hit has been known for a long time – it sits in a pit next to Mitchell’s spear, from where Shepard was around 24 yards from when he took his swing. Sanders’ remastering of the archival photos enabled him to find another voyage from another ball that landed on the moon.
Apollo historian and video editor W. David Woods told Arsen, “You can access the Apollo image very high quality.” “These shots were taken at 55 millimeters, one for 55 millimeters, negatives and transparencies on one side. The scans on them that are not available online are 11,000 pixels, so it’s very popular, huge pictures that you can really dive into. If you have mastered the image processing. “
Image tricks
Saunders has those skills. He relied on the latest high-resolution scans of the original flight film, and he also used a technique called substacking among others.
“Some of the material was shot using 16mm movie film,” Woods said. “Each individual image is fairly small and granular. But if you put them on top of each other, you cancel the grain, you cancel the sound, and you’re left with the image contained in all those frames. Those are the astronomers who use the trick, where they take lots and lots of pictures of a field in the night sky. They just cancel out the sound by stacking the images in the same way. “
The Apollo 14 crew took a series of photographs from the window of the lunar module to capture the scene for the descent, which Sanders stitched together in a single panorama. Given the well-known location of the TV camera, according to Sanders, it was possible to identify Shepard’s bootprints, showing his attitude to his first two (failed) attempts. Using a well-known scale of images taken by Lunar Reconnaissance bitwriter, he was then able to estimate the point between Dewat and another golf ball for 40 yards.
Sanders, whose next book is entitled Apollo RemasterIt is estimated that a professional US Open golfer, such as Bryson D. Kumbe, could, in principle, hit a ball up to 41.41 miles to the moon, which could last longer (and longer) than Shepard’s feat. As he told the BBC:
Unfortunately, even the most impressive second shot can rarely be described as “mile and mile and mile”, but of course this is only a mild exaggeration. The moon is effectively a huge, unraveled, rock-strewn bunker. The pressurized suit restricted serious movement, and he even struggled to see his feet because of the visors of his helmet. I would try to hit any club golfer by going to their local course and hitting a six-iron, one-handed with a quarter swing from an unraveled bunker. Then imagine wearing perfectly fitted, helmeted and thick gloves. Also remember that there was a bit of gravity pulling the clubhead down towards the ball. The fact that Shepard also approached and got the ball in the air is very impressive.
And of course, the astronaut’s legacy as the first human to play golf on the moon is preserved.
