50 years after Apollo, lunar litter is piling up...
FIFTY years ago today the Apollo 14 mission blasted off into space… and it would see astronaut Alan Shepard play golf on the Moon!
Amazingly, two of the balls he used are still up there. But they aren’t the only weird and wacky items humans have left behind. In fact, there is a whopping 200 tons of rubbish up there.
Here, JAMES MOORE reveals the pick of the lunar litter…
Having smuggled the head of a six iron on to the Apollo 14 spacecraft, along with a couple of golf balls, Shepard attached the club to an excavating tool during a moonwalk
– hitting them for
“miles and miles” thanks to the low gravity.
The club is now in a US museum. On the same mission Edgar Mitchell hurled a javelin made out of a lunar scoop.
In 1959 the Soviet probe Luna 2 dropped what looked like a metal football. It contained an explosive charge which fired lots of individual pennants reading “USSR January 1959” across the surface.
In 1971, Apollo 15’s James Irwin left behind some silver medallions bearing the fingerprints of his wife and children. The following year, Apollo 16 astronaut Charles Duke left a framed snap of his family on the surface.
Along with bits of landing modules and lunar probes there are three abandoned lunar rover vehicles used on the Apollo missions. One still has a Bible on the dashboard.
US geologist Gene Shoemaker, who died in 1997 aged 69 in a car crash, is the only person to have had their ashes taken to the Moon, on board a Nasa probe in 1999.
A six-inch golden olive branch was left by Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong – the first man to step on to the lunar surface. It was
“a wish for peace for all mankind”.
Apollo 15’s crew left a 3.5in metal statuette of a fallen spaceman by artist Paul Van Hoeydonck, right, to honour 14 astronauts and cosmonauts who had died in service.
That mission’s commander, David Scott, inset, carried out scientist Galileo Galilei’s classic experiment showing that a feather and hammer dropped at the same time would fall at the same speed. The feather, from an air force falcon mascot, and the tool are still there.
There are 96 bags of human poo and wee left on the Moon by visiting astronauts.
Among the things discarded on the Apollo missions to reduce the weight on the journey back to Earth are 12 pairs of space boots.
Six “Stars and Stripes” were planted by the Apollo missions. One has toppled over while the others have been bleached by UV rays from the sun.
Dinosaur remains may be on the Moon – hurled there when an asteroid hit Earth 66million years ago.
Tiny, super-tough bugs called tardigrades may still be alive on the surface after an Israeli probe carrying them crashed there in 2019.