Cosmonaut prepares for big swing
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – In space, nobody can hear you scream, “Fore!”
Then again, “fore” isn’t something Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin is likely to shout out today when he strikes a lightweight golf ball with a special 6-iron from outside the international space station in a promotional stunt for a Canadian golf club manufacturer.
Tyurin will be too busy trying to keep his balance during the one-handed swing in his bulky spacesuit. He’ll have one foot wedged in between the hand rails of a ladder on the outside of the space lab. Fortunately, he’ll be tethered, as astronauts are for spacewalks.
And if you’re disappointed over the lack of sound, sorry … you won’t be able to see Tyurin’s golf swing either – at least not in real time.
The cameras aren’t in position for it, although his crewmate will be filming it for the golf club maker, E21 Golf, to use later.
The golf stunt is the first task for Tyurin and U.S. astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria during a six-hour spacewalk set to begin around 3 p.m. PST. Their other jobs are more like real work – fixing a space station antenna and retrieving science experiments.
The golf stunt was supposed to take place earlier this year, but the U.S. space agency wanted more time to be sure the stunt would have little chance of damaging the space station, NASA officials said.
E21 paid an undisclosed sum for the stunt, which company officials have said commemorates the 35th anniversary of astronaut Alan Shepard’s memorable golf swing on the moon during the Apollo 14 mission in 1971.
It follows other commercial ventures at the space station that the Russian space agency has allowed, sometimes to the chagrin of NASA, such as bringing aboard paying tourists. The cash-strapped Russians also have allowed Pizza Hut to paint its logo on a rocket and have a pizza delivered to the space station. And it once charged PepsiCo $5 million to have cosmonauts float a replica of a soda can outside the Mir space station.
NASA has taken a grin-and-bear-it attitude. The U.S. space agency is indebted to its Russian partner for flying U.S. astronauts to the space station while shuttles were grounded after the Columbia disaster.