William Shatner is a son of a bitch (in the very best sense of the term)

[Kid Berwyn]

22. Thanks. Shepard and Grissom were -- are -- two of my heroes.

Sheperd was the only Mercury astronaut to walk on the moon. He had been grounded after his Freedom 7 flight — grounded by an inner ear condition. He persevered for years — missing out on Gemini — until he was cleared medically again for flight.

Remastered images reveal how far Alan Shepard hit a golf ball on the Moon

50 years ago, the Apollo 14 astronaut hit a golf ball that traveled roughly 40 yards.

JENNIFER OUELLETTE
Ars Technica - 2/4/2021,

Excerpt…

The idea for Shepard's golfing stunt came out of a 1970 visit by comedian Bob Hope to NASA headquarters in Houston. An avid golfer, Hope cracked a joke about hitting a golf ball on the Moon, and Shepard thought it would be an excellent means of conveying to people watching back on Earth the difference in the strength of gravity. So he paid a pro named Jack Harden at the River Oaks Country Club in Houston to adapt a Wilson Staff 6-iron head so that it could be attached to a collapsible aluminum and Teflon sample collector. Once NASA's Technical Services division added some finishing touches, Shepard practiced his golf swing at a course in Houston while wearing his 200-plus-pound spacesuit to prepare.

Most popular accounts describe Shepard as "smuggling" two balls and a golf club onto the spacecraft, but according to a later interview with Shepard, that wasn't the case. The astronaut ran the idea past then-NASA director Bob Gilruth, who was initially opposed but relented once Shepard laid out the precise details. Shepard also assured Gilruth that the stunt would only be done once all the official exploration tasks had been completed and then only if the mission had gone off without a hitch.

On February 6, Shepard brought out the club and two balls. His spacesuit was too bulky to use both hands, so he swung the makeshift club with just his right hand. After two swings that were "more dirt than ball," he made contact with the ball on his third swing, "shanking" it into a nearby crater. ("Looked like a slice to me, Al," Apollo 13 pilot Fred Haise joked while watching from Mission Control.)

But Shepard nailed his fourth attempt. He sent the ball soaring out of camera range and declared that it traveled for "miles and miles and miles." And as he had anticipated, the impressive 30-second time of flight perfectly showcased the difference in gravity between the Earth and the Moon. Not to be left out, crewmate Edgar Mitchell used a pole from a solar wind experiment as a javelin, which landed near the first golf ball. Once back on Earth, Shepard donated his makeshift club to the USGA museum and had a reproduction made that is now on display at the Smithsonian.

The location of the first ball Shepard hit has been known for quite some time—it's sitting in a crater next to Mitchell's javelin, about 24 yards from where Shepard stood when he took his swing. Saunders' remastering of archival photos enabled him to locate the second ball that traveled farther, as well as one of the divots in the lunar soil.

Continues…

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/02/remastered-images-reveal-how-far-alan-shepard-hit-a-golf-ball-on-the-moon/

Did you hear Gus’ capsule hatch may have blown open due to an unexpected static charge and not due to any action on the part of the astronaut?

New Evidence Shows That Gus Grissom Did Not Accidentally Sink His Own Spacecraft 60 Years Ago

Careful analysis of the recovery film showed it was static electricity that doomed the Liberty Bell 7.

By Tony Reichhardt
AIRSPACEMAG.COM , JULY 21, 2021

It’s one of the great mysteries of the early space age. How did Mercury astronaut Gus Grissom, after a near-perfect flight on just the second U.S. space mission, inadvertently “blow” the escape hatch prematurely on his Liberty Bell 7 capsule, causing it to fill with water and sink in the Atlantic? In fact, did Grissom blow the hatch? Or was some technical glitch to blame?

Grissom himself insisted he hadn’t accidentally triggered the explosive bolts designed to open the hatch during his ocean recovery. His NASA colleagues, by and large, believed him. Years later, Apollo flight director Gene Kranz told historians Francis French and Colin Burgess, “If Gus says he didn’t do it, he didn’t do it.” And, as writer George Leopold points out in his 2016 biography, Calculated Risk: The Supersonic Life and Times of Gus Grissom, NASA would later pick Grissom for the first shakedown flights of its Gemini and Apollo spacecraft—hardly what you’d expect if the agency had lost confidence in him.

But in his bestselling book The Right Stuff, author Tom Wolfe played the incident for laughs, reporting that test pilots outside NASA thought Grissom had, in their vernacular, “screwed the pooch.” The episode hung over the astronaut’s head until his premature death in 1967 in the Apollo 1 fire.

Now Leopold and Andy Saunders, a space photo expert and author of Apollo Remastered, think they’ve solved the mystery of what really happened to Liberty Bell 7 that day. An electrical discharge during the recovery operation—not a panicky or clumsy astronaut—caused the hatch to blow. Their detailed analysis is published today in Astronomy magazine.

Here’s how the capsule recovery was supposed to go: While Liberty Bell 7 bobbed in the water with Grissom inside, the rescue helicopter would move in close enough for co-pilot John Reinhard to lean out and snip off a long antenna on the capsule with a cutting tool. The helicopter would then hook onto the capsule and raise it enough for the hatch to be fully above water. Grissom would hit a button to blow the hatch, then climb out through the open hatchway to be hoisted on a sling into the helicopter.

Continues…

https://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/new-evidence-shows-gus-grissom-did-not-accidentally-sink-his-own-spacecraft-sixty-years-ago-180978240/

As you know, legro, Gus Grissom, with crew mates Edward White and Roger Chaffee would lose their lives in the Apollo 1 fire. Shepard died too young, as well, felled by leukemia. As the poet said, “Our time here isn’t long.”