Shepard’s golf balls and the 96 bags

Apollo 14 landed on 5 February 1971 in the Fra Mauro highlands, the hilly region that Apollo 13 had been meant to explore before its famous accident. Commander Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell walked on the Moon while Stuart Roosa orbited above. At 47, Shepard, who had been the first American in space ten years earlier, became the oldest person to walk on the Moon.

Apollo 14 is also remembered for something playful. At the end of his second moonwalk, Shepard fixed the head of a six-iron golf club to the handle of a sampling tool and hit two golf balls across the lunar surface. And this landing site, like all six Apollo sites, also holds something less glamorous: bags of the astronauts' pee and poo, left behind to save weight.

The mission

Apollo 14 launched on 31 January 1971 and returned on 9 February. Shepard and Mitchell made two moonwalks lasting a total of more than nine hours. To carry their tools and rocks they used a two-wheeled handcart, used only on Apollo 14, whose tyres were the first to roll there. They brought home about 43 kg of samples, including a big rock nicknamed Big Bertha that weighed about 9 kg. Roosa carried hundreds of tree seeds in orbit, which later grew into Moon trees on Earth.

Golf on the Moon

Shepard brought the club head along secretly and clipped it onto the long handle of a tool meant for scooping up soil. Wearing a stiff spacesuit, he could only swing with one hand. His first ball went into a nearby crater, and he joked that the second ball flew miles and miles. Much later, an imaging expert studied the video and photos and estimated that the two balls actually landed about 24 and 40 yards away, about 22 and 37 m.

What was left behind

Every kilogram lifted off the Moon cost fuel, so the Apollo crews threw out anything they no longer needed before take-off, to make room for Moon rocks. That included 96 bags of human waste across all six landings. They are still there today. With no wind or water to wear them down, they have mostly stayed whole. Some scientists would like to study them, to learn whether any microbes inside could have survived decades on the Moon.

On the 3D Moon

On the 3D Moon you can find Shepard's golf balls at the Apollo 14 site in Fra Mauro, along with a reminder of the 96 waste bags the Apollo crews left behind.