One of my 2.5-year-old son's favorite books is "A Is For Astronaut: Exploring Space from A to Z." Listed under the letter "G" is "golfball," for the balls that Alan Shepard hit on the moon during the 1971 Apollo 14 mission. This week, the "Question" section in the New York Times' Science Times recounts the interesting story behind Shepard's historic swings. From the NYT:
"Being a golfer," he said, "I thought if I could just get a club up there, and get it going through the ball at the same speed, that it would go six times as far as it would have gone here on Earth."
So with NASA's permission, he designed a club head to fit on the handle of the device the astronauts used to scoop up dust samples. (The collapsible club was brought back to Earth and became the property of the United States Golf Association.)
Before the flight, he practiced using it in a space suit and made a deal that if the mission went well, "then the last thing I was going to do, before climbing up the ladder to come home, was to whack these two golf balls."
