For the golf players here (e.g.
@Praefectus Praetorio is one, I believe), February 5th 1971, today fifty years ago, was a memorable day. That day, someone played golf for the first time… on the Moon. It was astronaut Alan Shepard, who had smuggled a few golf balls with him, and made a few drives with a makeshift club. Holes enough on the cratered Lunar surface.
With Apollo 14, launched on January 31th 1971, NASA returned to the Moon, after the nearly disastrous flight of Apollo 13 in April 1970. The crew of Apollo 14 : Commander Alan Shepard, Lunar Module pilot Edgar Mitchell and Command Module Pilot Stu Roosa. From Apollo 13 (Lovell, Haise and Mattingly/Swigert) on, the crews were composed of one experienced astronaut, the Commander, and two rookies. This would continue to the end of the program, with space veterans Scott, Young and Cernan respectively commanding the next three flights.
But with Apollo 14, the ‘experience’ of the commander, Alan Shepard, was a bit flattered. Shepard was a veteran from the original Mercury Seven. He (and not John Glenn) had been America’s first astronaut, but his flight on May 5th 1961 was just a suborbital trajectory of only fifteen minutes. Shepard then missed the Gemini program, grounded by Menière disease. After surgery, he got his flight status back, but he had never made an orbital space flight. The crew of Apollo 14 is ‘rooted’ in the back-up crew of Apollo 10, which conducted tests of the Lunar Module over the Moon itself in May 1969. Yet, from the members of the Apollo 14 crew, only Mitchell was assigned to the back-up crew of Apollo 10 at the time. The others were Gordon Cooper, another Mercury Seven veteran and having flown with Mercury and Gemini, and Donn Eisele, previously on the Apollo 7 flight. However, in the course of time, Cooper was bumped because of lack of commitment, and Eisele for his part in the ‘Apollo 7 mutiny’ and because of his marital problems, affecting his commitment too. He was replaced by Roosa, and Cooper by Shepard.
Following the rotation system applied by NASA for the Apollo program, the back-up crew of Apollo 10 would have become the prime crew of Apollo 13. But the limited flight experience of Shepard took its toll. A few months before the scheduled launch date of Apollo 13, NASA decided to swap the crews of Apollo 13 and 14, to give Shepard more time. So, it would not be Shepard who would bring back the crippled Apollo 13 module, but Lovell.
Apollo 14 was a successful flight. Shepard became the only astronaut of the original Mercury Seven to walk on the Moon, and, being 47 years old at the time, also the oldest person who did so as yet.
None of the three crew members would return to space. Roosa died at an early age of 61,in 1994, Shepard passed away in the summer of 1998. With the death of Edgar Mitchell in 2016, Apollo 14 became the first Apollo flight of which all members had deceased.
And the Fra Mauro highland is still the most remote golf course in the universe. No one want went back there as yet.