As I promised when I talked about the conspiracy theories that surround the Moon, I will explain how Alan Shepard put a golf ball out of the Moon’s gravitational pull, however, I can’t do it without commenting on the Apollo 14.
The Apollo 14 mission was the last of the H-missions, intended for research on lunar sites of interest, this time was on the Lunar highlands, being the first time an Apollo spacecraft landed there.
The Apollo 14 meant a lot of changes and upgrades in the spacecraft since the Apollo 13, for obvious reasons (I mean, exploding in outer space is a big of a deal, so NASA better avoid it this time), for example, a completely redesign of the oxygen tanks and the addition of a third tank in the opposite side of the other two that could be isolated in addition with an emergency water tank and batteries between other changes.
Other highlights of the mission include it being delayed 40 minutes due to bad weather conditions to avoid what happened during the launch of the Apollo 12 that got struck by lightning (This is not a reference to any Toto song, it literally happened twice during that launch), also, several hundreds of seeds where brought on the mission and later germinated on the Earth, its scientific purposes are not clear for me but it’s just cool to call “Moon tree” to some random apple tree.
However, we shall go back to our initial topic: golf balls bombarding earth from the space. So, we should talk first about Alan Shepard; being a serviceman in the navy during the Second World War, becoming a naval pilot a year after the end of the conflict and was selected by the NASA as one of the original Mercury Seven and became the first American to travel into space (Yuri Gagarin laughing in Russian). Sadly, he got grounded in 1963 due to a medical condition that affected his ears and was only in 1968 that he recovered the flight condition after a successful experimental surgery and became the commander of the Apollo 14 commander.
It was during this mission that he brought to golf balls to the Moon and crafted a handmade club with a sample scoop that had to swing with just one hand due to the spacesuit he had on at the time (You obviously can’t wear Sunday clothes on the Moons surface). His golf skills were shown in the TV while he joked about playing on Moon’s gravity with “Miles and miles and miles” while later high-resolution analysis showed a distance of about 20m for the first ball and 40 for the second, while others claimed that the balls traveled about 30 seconds so maybe not miles and miles but just one mile, anyway, we can conclude that none of this balls escaped from the Moon and that I’m a liar and a non-trustworthy source of information…See you next time!
