Playing football on the Moon Options

[karolp]

Well not with a real ball but with a football-sized rock. I remember a movie showing an astronaut doing that on one of the later missions. I kind of need to find it again because a Polish friend of mine argues with me that this never happened. I also get the impression they were playing golf there as well. Apollo 16? Apollo 17? Any clues on that?

[djellison]

No football that I know of. Al Shepard played golf on Apollo 14 though.

Doug

[Bob Shaw]

No football that I know of. Al Shepard played golf on Apollo 14 though.

Doug

Doug:

And hammer throwing on Apollo 17.

Bob Shaw

[Phil Stooke]

There were a few cases of astronauts rolling rocks down slopes - on Apollo 12 certainly, but out of view of the TV camera. I think on Apollo 15 they rolled a rock down the lower slope of Hadley Delta, at Station 2 or 6 or 7. A push with a foot would look like soccer. I guess...

Phil

[paxdan]

A17 station 8, Jack Schmitt kicks a rock down a hill. Vid clip has a classic - hey y'all watch this - feel about it:
"Go! Roll! Look I would roll on this slope, why don't you"

The ALSJ is an unbeatable resource for this kind of thing.

[dvandorn]

To the point -- your friend is right, no one ever played football on the Moon, not even with a football-sized rock. Several missions, especially Apollos 12 and 14, had as a sampling goal a "football-sized rock," which was something of an overstatement -- they were looking for a rock with a long diameter of at least 15 or 20 cm. But they never actually played football with them.

However, there was one very memorable moment during the very first lunar EVA, during which Buzz Aldrin was demonstrating methods of forward movement in front of the TV camera. (Hey, this was the first time any human had ever tried walking in a low-G field -- they wanted documentation of how different forms of forward locomotion actually worked.)

Aldrin ran through several different stride patterns, including the "bunny hop" method of jumping with both feet together, and a more normal stepping walk.

He then demonstrated what most lunar astronauts adopted for traveling any distance -- the lope. It was a stepping stride in which you pushed off and floated with both feet in the air for a moment before setting down with the other foot, pushing off with it, floating for another moment, etc. As he approached the camera using this loping stride, he showed how you have to anticipate a turn by a couple of steps, saying that to "change directions, like a football player, you just have to put a foot out to the side and cut a little bit." He then performed a classic football-runner cut move to angle his mass in his new direction of travel before executing his turn.

This could be taken as Aldrin "playing football" on the Moon, but except for the reference of "like a football player," it was never intended to be such.

-the other Doug

[karolp]

I have not given up and finally found it. It was in the Space Movie Archive - a huge astronomy and spaceflight clips database which used to be kept on a French server by Frank Roussel in the late 1990s. It ceased to function around 2000 as the server broke down. Yet it is still accessible via webarchive.org. Scroll down to Apollo 17 and then goes "Astronauts play soccer with rock, formats: Avi (1460Kb)". The name of the movie file is "apo17e.avi.gz":

http://web.archive.org/web/19990508225646/...ollo%20missions

[dvandorn]

OK -- the Apollo 17 exercise was to try and roll a rock down a slope, both to sample the soil underneath and to abserve the dynamics of the rolling rock. And to observe the trail it left in the dust -- on Apollo 17, the crew visited several rocks which had rolled down the sides of the massifs, which had left trails of their own in the dust. They wanted to observe tracks being formed, in order to better understand the dynamics of the much larger trails.

In the event you cite, Jack Schmitt was trying to get a rock to roll down the hill, and was having little luck. He was talking to the rock, telling it "Roll! Why don't you roll down this slope?! I would!" Cernan came over and tried to help Schmitt kick the rock over so that it would start to roll. They never got it to roll for more than about one turn... but the two of them trying to kick the rock down the hill could, I suppose, look a little like they were playing football with it.

Again, though, that wasn't the intent. There were several demontrations that various lunar crews planned -- the golf shot on Apollo 14, the hammer-and-feather "proof" on Apollo 15, the Lunar Olympics on Apollo 16 (which they ended up not doing)... these were planned to demonstrate the kinds of things you could do while moving in a low-G field.

In the unplanned category, there are things like Cernan on Apollo 17 loping down a slope and, realizing he was shifting his hips like a skier, started making "schussing" sounds. But, again, I don't think anyone would seriously allege that Cernan went skiing on the Moon.

-the other Doug

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

The rock-rolling on Apollo 12 was also done deliberately, to provide a record for the seismometer of how such events would sound if any natural one occurred. As for the hammer and feather demonstration on Apollo 15, I loved it -- it was a splendid Mr. Wizard moment that made up for such dumb stunts as Shepard's golf shots and Nixon's time-consuming phone call on Apollo 11.

[djellison]

They had a great pseudo-replica of the Apollo 15 experiment at the new Space centre in the Wirrall ( opposite Liverpool ) - feather + lead weight in a pair of evacuated tubes...worked beautifully

Doug

[Bob Shaw]

The rock-rolling on Apollo 12 was also done deliberately, to provide a record for the seismometer of how such events would sound if any natural one occurred. As for the hammer and feather demonstration on Apollo 15, I loved it -- it was a splendid Mr. Wizard moment that made up for such dumb stunts as Shepard's golf shots and Nixon's time-consuming phone call on Apollo 11.

Bruce:

I believe that Buzz Aldrin toook the opportunity to make a practical contribution to his personal comfort level during Tricky Dick's call!

Bob Shaw

[paxdan]

I believe that Buzz Aldrin toook the opportunity to make a practical contribution to his personal comfort level during Tricky Dick's call!

one small p*** for man, one giant +++NO CARRIER+++

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Good thing his suit microphone wasn't sensitive...

By the way, a few years ago Alan Dean Foster (an SF writer I loathed until then) wrote an extremely funny story about NASA's discovery that the only drug that can alleviate the effects of long-term zero-G is a cannabis derivative. They keep this fact hushed up, and the first manned trip to Mars actually goes quite well -- until the President insists on speaking to the crew live after their triumphant if somewhat wobbly landing...

[ilbasso]

Alan Bean painted an imaginary football scene in "If We Could Do It All Over Again" - see http://www.alanbeangallery.com/AllOverAgain-new.html

The story behind the painting is at http://www.alanbeangallery.com/AllOverAgain-story.html - basically, that Pete Conrad, after watching Alan Shepard's golf shot, said to Bean, "Why didn't we think of something like that?"

[DEChengst]

I find it hard to believe Americans would play football on the moon