Which sport was played on the Moon in 1971?
Apollo 14 astronaut Alan Shepard hit golf balls on the Moon with a makeshift club.
Alan Shepard, commander of Apollo 14, hit golf balls on the Moon on February 6, 1971, at the end of the second moonwalk in the Fra Mauro region. He had smuggled the head of a six-iron aboard as a personal item and fitted it onto the handle of a lunar sample-collection tool, so he could swing it with one hand because his pressurized suit restricted his movement. He had two balls and announced that the second flew for miles and miles.
That boast has been tested against the television footage. Analyses of the images suggest the balls went tens of yards at best rather than miles, and the first swing barely moved the ball. The physics still favored a long flight for a good strike: lunar gravity is about one-sixth of Earth's, and with no atmosphere there is no drag, so a ball would stay aloft several times longer than on Earth. The suit and lack of a proper grip kept the shot well short of that potential.
The club head was later donated to the USGA Museum in New Jersey, and the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum holds a replica. Apollo 14's crew also did other informal things on the surface; Edgar Mitchell, for instance, tossed a scoop handle like a javelin. The golf swing remains the best-known case of a sport being played on another world, and no other sport has been documented there.