There are golf balls on the moon.
On February 6, 1971, Alan Shepard took one small shot for golf and one giant swing for golfkind. An astronaut on the Apollo 14 landing, Shepard was also a golf enthusiast who decided to bring his hobby all the way to the moon — along with a makeshift club fashioned partly from a sample-collection device. He took two shots, claiming that the second went “miles and miles.” The United States Golf Association (USGA) later put the actual distance of his two strokes at about 24 yards and 40 yards, respectively.
While not enough to land him a spot on the PGA Tour, those numbers are fairly impressive when you remember that the stiff spacesuit Shepard was wearing (in low gravity, no less) forced him to swing with one arm. And while those two golf balls remain on the moon, Shepard brought his club back, later donating it to the USGA Museum in Liberty Corner, New Jersey. Other objects now residing on the moon include photographs, a small gold olive branch, and a plaque that reads: “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.”
Every year, the moon gets just a little bit farther away from Earth — 3.78 centimeters, to be precise. This is caused by the interaction between its gravity and our oceans, which influence each other in such a way that a small amount of energy is transferred to the moon’s orbital rotation. Over time, those centimeters really add up: The moon is thought to have been thousands of miles closer to us when it was first formed approximately 4.5 billion years ago.
