![]() ![]() Shepard also made sure to clear his golf shot with senior management, approaching then-MSC director Bob Gilruth to get buy-in. ![]() NASA's technical services division also assisted with the golf "club" construction, which had to meet the same strict safety requirements as other spacecraft payloads. Jack Harden, the pro at River Oaks Country Club in Houston, made the clubhead. Shepard, the commander of Apollo 14 and a long-time NASA astronaut, used his connections to discreetly ask for help keeping the plan a surprise. Hope took his golf club everywhere, according to the USGA, and Shepard was inspired to do a quick golf session on the moon to demonstrate the moon's gravitational pull, which is one-sixth that of Earth, according to NASA. Shepard got the idea for his golf moonshot in 1970, when famed golfer Bob Hope visited NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC, now Johnson Space Center) in Houston, the training hub for astronauts, for a television special. Golf clubs usually don't come apart as Shepard's moon club did, but Shepard needed the modification to fold it into the cramped quarters of the Apollo lunar lander. Why "unusual and interesting"? Technically speaking, the golf club was a Wilson Staff Dyna-Power 6-iron head attached to a sampling tool - a five-piece tool loosely held together by string when not fully assembled - that was made of aluminum and Teflon. The artifact has a lot of those great feelings attached to it the look of it is unusual and interesting compared to other golf equipment," she explained. "The Apollo program represented national pride and hope for the future. Nenno said the artifact is typically one of the most popular in the museum - not taking into account the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and associated quarantine rules, of course, which have affected tourist destinations worldwide. Shepard and Crosby were already acquainted from playing together at Pebble Beach, California, a well-known golf haven for enthusiasts. Shepard was convinced to part with his precious moon club after the famed singer and entertainer Bing Crosby, a member of the USGA committee in 1972, wrote Shepard saying the museum would be "an ideal repository for the celebrated implement," Nenno said. The rules surrounding giving space artifacts to astronauts were different in the 1970s, so Shepard kept the club before donating it to the USGA Museum in Liberty Corner, New Jersey, roughly an hour west of New York City, in 1974. Happily for golf fans, Shepard found room to tuck away his modified club in the lunar module that was lucky given that astronauts often discarded equipment on the moon to make room for precious rock samples. This means NASA astronauts Shepard and Ed Mitchell likely couldn't have seen the balls themselves from the spacecraft, either during their time on the ground or when flying away from the moon. The two balls are also visible in Apollo 14 takeoff footage, but only after applying "a complex stacking technique on multiple separate frames," according to a USGA Golf Journal story. ![]()
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