_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [80]
They gathered samples from the boulder field and started back. Coming down the slope was much, much easier. They could almost fly. Striding downhill, the moon’s weak gravity permitted them to leap over rocks as they went, and soon they had reached the lunar module. They loaded their booty aboard and were ready once again to climb into Antares’s cabin.
Well, almost ready.
“Houston,” Shepard called Mission Control, removing a small metal flange from his suit pocket. He carefully attached it to the long aluminum handle of the collector he’d used to pick up rock samples.
I was co-anchoring the NBC Radio Network’s coverage in our broadcast trailer outside Mission Control, and I laughed loudly. I knew what was about to happen. Shepard had let me in on his secret. I turned to my stunned co-anchor. “Russ, have you ever wondered how far an average golfer could hit a ball in lunar gravity? Well, Mr. Ward, you’re about to find out.”
“Houston,” Shepard paused for effect, “you might recognize what I have in my hand…the handle for the contingency sample. It just so happens to have a genuine six-iron on the bottom.”
Those in Mission Control were now laughing.
Shepard reached into a pouch of his suit and held up a golf ball.
“In my left hand I have a little white pellet that’s familiar to millions of Americans.”
The flight controllers grinned.
Alan Shepard, an avid golfer, dropped the ball into the moon dust. He made his best effort to assume a normal two-handed stance to address the ball, but his bulky spacesuit would permit only a one-handed swipe.
“I’m trying a sand-trap shot.” He laughed as he swung awkwardly, the six-iron spraying moon dust and dropping the ball into a crater only a few feet away.
“I got more dirt than ball.”
“Looked more like a slice to me,” Mitchell quipped.
Shepard wasn’t to be stopped. He dropped a second ball and the home-rigged golf club found its target, sending the white ball racing away into the black sky.
“There it goes! Miles and miles and miles!” Shepard said with pride.
Some argued the golf ball sailed only a few hundred yards while others, taking the weak gravity into account, suggested it could have gone into its own lunar orbit.
With his Tom Sawyer grin Alan later told me, “I really don’t know where the damn thing went.”
Shepard and Mitchell ran through their pre-lunar-launch checklist, made sure everything that was suppose to be on board was on board, and Shepard turned to the remote television camera.
Alan Shepard’s golf shot on the moon. (Shepard Collection).
Apollo 14 moon rocks. Alan Shepard (right) leans over to view a basketball-size rock being examined by Ed Mitchell (table, left). (NASA).
“Okay, Houston, the crew of Antares is leaving Fra Mauro Base.”
“Roger, Antares.”
With mixed emotions, Shepard and Mitchell closed their lander’s hatch and monitored the countdown timers as they flashed away the minutes and seconds. Antares’s ascent rocket shot flaming thrust into its descent-stage launch pad. The lunar module leapt from the moon and sped into the black sky, into its rendezvous orbit with Apollo 14’s command ship Kitty Hawk.
The docking of the two spacecraft was perfection. Kitty Hawk fired up and carried its smiling crew home.
The legacy of Apollo 14 went far beyond returning the lunar landing program to safe flight. The three remaining Apollo lunar landings, which had been on the edge of cancellation, would not be cut.
On July 26, 1971, Apollo 15 astronauts Dave Scott, Jim Irwin, and Al Worden flamed onto the lunar highway. Scott and Irwin rode their lander, Falcon, to the foothills of the Apennine Mountains while Worden, overhead in Endeavour, began a photo survey for future landing sites.
Dave Scott and Jim Irwin became the seventh and eighth astronauts to step onto the moon. They had been given a great landing site. They stared in wonder at the Apennines, mountains towering fifteen thousand feet, as they drove the first lightweight electric car, a cross between a golf cart and a dune buggy, over the lunar surface. They drove it up and