[X] My Assistant

[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?

[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