Fifty years ago Alan Shepard exploded from an endless sand trap and we just found his bullet

The most watched golf shot in history did not take place in a major tournament. It wasn’t even in a PGA event. In fact, it did not take place on Earth. And, as it turns out, its distance has been embellished by legend.

It was a one-handed chip with a converted Wilson Staff 6 iron clubhead fitted to an aluminum moon rock sample shovel. And the golfer was Alan Shepard, first American in space, 5th man on the moon.

Shepard hit two golf balls on live TV exactly half a century ago yesterday at the end of the Apollo 14 moonwalk. Due to the perpendicular angle of the portable TV camera to the flight of the ball, the exact distance of the shots was left to the original astronaut commentary “Mercury Seven”. The first, he clearly duffed.

But the second seemed to be nuts and Shepard suggested he could have walked “miles and miles!”

Well, not exactly. But who follows up?

Nobody really, until 46-year-old British imagery specialist Andy Saunders used his skills to improve the clarity of long-sequestered video and photography of Apollo 14 and other lunar missions. And the results are simply astounding.

Saunders painstaking work used both new digital and traditional photographic techniques to improve the brightness, sharpness and contrast of 5-decade-old Apollo Moon (1968-72) shots so that we can now see more clearly all kinds of details previously hidden. – from the desolate gray surface to the obscured faces of the astronauts behind their helmet visors to the intricate features of the lunar landers and equipment to, yes, the exact position of Shepard’s two golf shots.

Saunders’ photographs will be published later this year in a book titled Apollo remastered, forthcoming by Penguin Random House. Some were published by NASA and can also be seen on the publisher’s advanced website, ApolloRemastered.com.

Being the son of an industrial engineer at Apollo, a North American Rockwell command / service module subcontractor, I grew up surrounded by the wonders of the US space program. So I couldn’t wait to spend half an hour on Friday with Saunders by phone from his home in Culcheth, County Cheshire, England.

As Saunders explains, the original and clearest film negatives were stored in a NASA cold room until very recently:

“Somewhere in the last five years, they finally pulled the original robbery movie out of the freezer and scanned it at incredible resolution with files around 1.3 gigabytes. And every minute detail of this camera is on this digital file. “

To someone like Saunders – a space maniac from childhood who had developed tremendous skills with image enhancement – it was like a gift from heaven.

“But of course, in an analog world, with photochemical processing, they weren’t designed for digital; they were designed so that light passes through them on paper or in projection. So you need to improve them digitally to get the most out of them. And that’s what I use.

Given the advancements in digital enhancement technology over the past decade, this has offered a unique opportunity to significantly clarify some of the most important images in human history.

So how far did that 6 iron shots go in one sixth of gravity? It was the subject of hyperbolic guesswork, not just a little encouraged by mischievous player Shepard before his death in 1998.

We will come back to that. But first, some info on how Shepard managed to golf on Earth’s sand trap satellite. He had been seeded with the idea by a casual crack of Bob Hope during the comedian’s visit to the Johnson Spaceflight Center in Houston in 1970. The idea stuck with Shepard when it was slated for Apollo 14 later that year.

Shepard tells the whole story of lunar golf taken at 1:02:30 am from an 88-minute interview with former NBC Spaceflight correspondent and Philadelphia native Roy Neal, conducted in 1998, five months before the death of the ‘astronaut following leukemia:

“I was an avid golfer. And before the flight, I was intrigued that a ball, with the same clubhead speed, would go six times farther and that its flight time would be at least six times longer. It wouldn’t bend, because there is no atmosphere to make it slice or hang.

“So, I thought to myself, what a cool place to hit a golf ball.”

When Shepard approached NASA Human Spaceflight Director Bob Gilruth with his idea, the response was immediate and emphatic: forget it. But Shepard persisted with an explanation: The only additional cargo was the clubhead, made by a pro he knew in Houston, plus a few golf balls:

“What I paid for myself,” Shepard added with a puckish smile. “No expense for taxpayers.”

All of this would be left on the lunar surface. If something goes wrong during either of the two-and-a-half-hour extravehicular activities (EVAs) on the Moon, Shepard agreed that he wouldn’t. If all went according to plan, he had hit a few balls at the very end of the second EVA on February 6, 1971, climbed the ranks with partner and lunar module pilot Ed Mitchell, and closed the hatch.

In other words, it was sort of the mic drop of the show. And at this point in the Apollo program – with the lunar missions getting incredibly old hat more than two years after Apollo 8’s first lunar orbit and 18 months after Apollo 11’s first manned landing – the spectacle mattered. Gilruth relented.

In the end, everything turned out beautifully with Shepard and Mitchell’s EVA, so came out the modified clubhead and two balls that the CO had stored in a pocket of his suit. He smashed it on the Moonrock shovel, threw a bullet in the dust, and addressed it with some flair.

Shepard knew from trying his flexibility in the bulky suit during training that there was no way he could handle much of a backswing or keep both of his hands gloved on the shovel handle. His vision was also limited by the inability to bend his neck much inside the EVA helmet. So he only used his right hand and attempted a kind of ball kick like a gardener hitting weeds with a scythe.

His first hit at the first bullet barely moved him. The second try was choppy and obviously didn’t go far, prompting a mocking reaction from Mitchell. But after the third and final try, on a second ball, Shepard exclaimed as if he was Lee Trevino admiring a perfect workout: “Miles and miles and miles! This is the photo viewers imagined they had stolen over and over again, unhindered by the atmosphere.

Saunders has been working on all images of the Apollo moon for years and some of the results are amazing. In one, you can now clearly see Neil Armstrong’s face behind his visor, a rare shot anyway because he had the camera for most EVAs and almost every lunar plan you see from Apollo 11 are from Lunar Module Pilot and Moonwalker Companion Buzz Aldrin.

Thus, improving Apollo 14 is only part of a major project. But the search for Shepard golf balls was an obvious draw:

“Before, you might have been able to find a golf ball in the old quality. It looked a bit like a boulder, even in the newer high resolution scans. But [now] you could zoom in so far, because they were in such a high resolution, and process them hard enough that you could tell – that was absolutely a golf ball.

Saunders was able to find and triangulate the position of the two balls using front and side still photos from the portable lunar camera and aerial photos from the video camera at the top of the lunar module’s ascent phase as it took off. to return to the control module.

Bottom line: Shepard’s first shot was 24 yards. The landing point of his second, which had never been seen before, was actually not “miles and miles” away, as most of those familiar with Shepard’s mischievous nature roughly suspected. – but only 40 meters.

Another great golf tale. Saunders gives it all the credit, regardless:

“One hand, quarter swing, can’t see properly, with that giant backpack, effectively hitting the solar system’s largest sand trap?” Good game.”

Theoretically, how far could a golf ball be driven to the moon by a bomber such as Bryson DeChambeau, given a hypothetical future in which humans could be shielded from extreme lunar temperatures in skin-tight suits that we can’t possibly imagine today in some sort of sheltered lunar franchise Topgolf? According to physicists at NASA, calculations indicate Shepard’s exaggeration would no longer be one: about 3.1 miles.

Alan Shepard was a man of a myriad of accomplishments, including rare bravery as a jet fighter test pilot, not to mention his assembly of a Redstone rocket in 1961, which previous editions had exploded on the carpet, to be the first American to mount the space fire.

Still, crazy enough, he’s probably best known 23 years after his death for being the only golfer on the Moon.

He probably wouldn’t mind, as he later claimed about that 6 iron from a bad lie:

“It was designed to be fun. Fortunately he was a funny thing.

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