Apollo 14

• 1. Introduction

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  Apollo 14 launched on the 31st of January 1971, carrying three astronauts on a mission that no one in the program could afford to lose. The previous flight, Apollo 13, had nearly killed its crew and ended human exploration of the Moon before it had barely begun. NASA's engineers had spent months tearing apart the spacecraft, rewiring circuits, replacing oxygen tanks, and rehearsing failure scenarios nobody wanted to imagine again. Now Shepard, Roosa, and Mitchell were strapping themselves into a rebuilt rocket and heading back. What malfunctions would they face before reaching the surface? Who was this gray-haired commander making his first flight in a decade? And what on Earth did a golf club have to do with any of it?

• 2. Alan Shepard Returns

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  Alan Shepard was the first American in space, riding a suborbital arc above the Atlantic on the 5th of May 1961. Then his inner ear betrayed him. A disorder called Meniere's disease grounded him for years, and Shepard channeled his frustration into administration, running the Astronaut Office as Chief Astronaut while his colleagues flew Gemini and Apollo missions without him. Experimental surgery in 1968 restored his balance and his eligibility to fly. At age 47, he became the oldest American astronaut to leave Earth and, after reaching the surface, the oldest person to walk on the Moon.

  Deke Slayton, Director of Flight Crew Operations and himself one of the original Mercury Seven, had originally slotted Shepard for Apollo 13. NASA's management objected that Shepard needed more preparation time, given that he had not flown since 1961. He and his crew were moved to Apollo 14, and Jim Lovell's crew took their place on 13. That swap would matter enormously. Mitchell later put the stakes plainly: if Apollo 14 also failed, there was probably no way NASA could withstand two consecutive aborted missions.

• 3. Stuart Roosa and the Seeds

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  Stuart Roosa was 37 years old when Apollo 14 flew, and before he ever joined the Air Force in 1953, he had worked as a smoke jumper. He trained at the Aerospace Research Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in 1965, was selected as a Group 5 astronaut the following year, and served as a capsule communicator for Apollo 9. For his solo stint in lunar orbit, Roosa sought out geologist Farouk El-Baz, who had trained the Apollo 13 prime crew's Command Module Pilot. The two pored over lunar maps together, and Roosa even practiced orbital observation techniques by flying his T-38 jet at speeds and altitudes that mimicked the pace at which the lunar surface would scroll beneath the Command and Service Module.

  Roosa also tucked several hundred tree seeds into his personal kit for the flight. After the mission returned to Earth, many of those seeds germinated and the resulting seedlings were distributed around the world as Moon trees. Some went to state forestry associations in 1975 and 1976, timed to mark the United States Bicentennial. A primary camera system Roosa was meant to use in orbit, the Lunar Topographic Camera, failed early due to a tiny piece of aluminum contaminating the shutter control circuit. He salvaged many of his photographic objectives with a Hasselblad camera instead, including confirming that the Descartes Highlands were a viable landing site, which became the destination for Apollo 16.

• 4. Malfunctions on the Way Down

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  The docking mechanism refused to engage when Roosa first brought the Command Module toward the Lunar Module after translunar injection. Over the next two hours he made multiple attempts while mission controllers searched for a solution. The fix was to retract the docking probe and let bare contact trigger the latches manually. It worked. The S-IVB third stage, set on a collision course with the Moon after separation, impacted just over three days later and set the Apollo 12 seismometer vibrating for more than three hours.

  Then, after Antares separated from Kitty Hawk in lunar orbit, a faulty switch began sending the onboard computer a continuous abort signal. Engineers suspected a tiny ball of solder floating loose and bridging the circuit. Tapping the panel nearby cleared it temporarily, but the signal returned. The software was hard-wired and could not be patched remotely, so the team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology devised a workaround that made the system believe an abort had already occurred, causing it to ignore further automated abort commands. Mitchell entered the new instructions with only minutes remaining before planned ignition.

  During the powered descent, the landing radar failed to acquire the surface automatically. Mission rules required an abort if the radar was still out at 10,000 feet. The astronauts cycled the breaker and the unit locked on near 22,000 feet. Shepard guided Antares to the most accurate landing of any of the six missions that reached the Moon.

• 5. On the Surface

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  Shepard's first words after stepping onto the lunar surface were: "And it's been a long way, but we're here." The first EVA began at 9:42 am EST on the 5th of February 1971, delayed by five hours because of a problem with the communications system. Mitchell deployed two 310-foot geophone lines stretching out from the ALSEP's central station, then walked back firing thumper explosives every 15 feet to generate seismic data about the regolith's depth and composition. Of the 21 thumpers, five failed to fire.

  The second EVA's main goal was Cone crater, whose rim promised access to material thrown up from deep below the surface by a young, powerful impact. The terrain proved nothing like the orbital photographs. Craters that should have served as landmarks looked completely different from ground level. Shepard and Mitchell consistently misjudged how far they had walked and overestimated distances covered. Fred Haise, serving as CAPCOM and drawing on his Apollo 13 training for the same landing site, monitored their heavy breathing and rapid heartbeats while the television camera back near the LM showed him nothing. They topped one ridge expecting the crater rim, found more rolling terrain beyond, and were eventually told to collect samples where they stood and return. Later analysis placed them within about 65 feet of the rim. Imagery from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter showed their tracks and those of the two-wheeled Modular Equipment Transporter coming within 30 meters.

  Once back within range of the television camera, Shepard produced the stunt he had been planning for years. He had smuggled a Wilson six iron club head onto the spacecraft and fitted it to the handle of a contingency sample tool. He hit two golf balls one-handed, the EVA suit limiting his swing, and declared the second went "miles and miles and miles." Mitchell responded by hurling a lunar scoop handle like a javelin. Both the javelin and one golf ball landed in a crater, Mitchell's throw edging ahead. In February 2021, imaging specialist Andy Saunders produced enhanced photographs estimating the first ball traveled approximately 24 yards and the second approximately 40 yards. Shepard returned the club head to Earth and donated it to the USGA Museum in New Jersey, with a replica going to the National Air and Space Museum.

• 6. What the Rocks Told Us

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  Shepard and Mitchell returned 94.35 pounds of lunar material, most of it breccias, the fused-fragment rocks created by meteorite impacts. The Apollo 14 basalts were distinctively old, formed between 4.0 and 4.3 billion years ago, predating the volcanic activity found at any other Apollo landing site. The Fra Mauro formation itself is composed of ejecta from the event that created Mare Imbrium, meaning the samples offered a window into what lay deep beneath the lunar surface before later volcanism reshaped it.

  Geologists were divided on the mission's success. Some were satisfied enough with the near-miss at Cone crater to send a case of scotch to the astronauts during post-mission quarantine. Geologist Don Wilhelms was less generous. He wrote that aside from one rock, sample 14321, the crew had retrieved less than one kilogram from the crater's rim flank, calling it the most important single point reached by astronauts on the Moon. Geologist Lee Silver criticized the crew's preparation and attitude. The largest single specimen, Big Bertha, weighing 19.837 pounds, drew renewed attention in January 2019 when researchers from Curtin University found granite and quartz within it, materials common on Earth but rare on the Moon. Zircon dating placed the rock's age at approximately four billion years. Researcher Alexander Nemchin stated that the zircon's chemistry closely resembled that of zircons found on Earth rather than any other lunar sample, raising the possibility that Big Bertha is a terrestrial meteorite, and if so, the oldest known Earth rock ever recovered.

• 7. Quarantine and Aftermath

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  Kitty Hawk splashed down in the South Pacific Ocean on the 9th of February 1971 at 21:05 UTC, approximately 900 miles south of American Samoa. The ship USS New Orleans recovered the crew, who were then flown to Pago Pago International Airport in Tafuna before continuing to Honolulu and then to Ellington Air Force Base near Houston inside an aircraft carrying a Mobile Quarantine Facility trailer. They finished their isolation in the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, released on the 27th of February 1971. Apollo 14's astronauts were the last lunar explorers subjected to post-flight quarantine, and the only Apollo crew quarantined both before and after their flight.

  During the return voyage, Mitchell conducted ESP experiments without NASA's knowledge, attempting to transmit images of cards to four recipients on Earth. He reported afterward that two of the four scored 51 out of 200 correct, against a random-chance baseline of 40. The command module Kitty Hawk eventually traveled from display facilities in Downey, California to the United States Astronaut Hall of Fame near Titusville, Florida, and now sits at the Apollo/Saturn V Center at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. On Orbit 17, Roosa had been able to spot sunlight glinting off Antares on the surface below; on Orbit 29, he could see the sun reflecting off the ALSEP array. The Laser Ranging Retroreflector deployed during the mission, along with those left by Apollo 11 and Apollo 15, remains one of the only Apollo experiments still returning data from the Moon today.