Throughout the history of crewed spacceflight, many astronauts have taken to playing sports like golf and football in space or on the Moon.
From the International Space Station, the wonderous sight of Earth’s land masses and seas passing below would surely never become tiresome.
But it seems that astronauts on prolonged tours of duty in space have found other activities to be a necessary stimulus, and they’ve tried all manner of leisure pursuits beyond simply watching the world go by.
In a sporting context, golf features high up on the activity list of astronauts in space.
Discover the strangest things found on the International Space Station and the biggest dangers astronauts face on the ISS
Golf
At the risk of having a good spacewalk ruined, the first to set a trend for sport in space and play golf on the Moon was Apollo 14 astronaut Alan Shepard.
During a live broadcast from the Moon in February 1971, he decided to share his skills by attempting to drive a ball down the lunar fairway with a six iron.
Whereas Earth-based golfers might be able to blame a tactical cough from a playing partner for any miscue, Shepard’s defence for several unimpressive shots was literally out of this world.
For a start, the club wasn’t exactly regulation kit – it was the head of a six iron attached to a modified sample-collecting device.
Then let’s consider Shepard’s spacesuit: less a Pringle sweater, more a garment protecting against certain death, the material of which did nothing for free movement, ultimately forcing Shepard to play his shot single-handed with a challenged swing.
Roll on to 2006 and it was the turn of Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin to tee off.
Tyurin used his own gold-plated six iron to drive a ball from the ‘porch’ area of the ISS.
With US astronaut Michael López-Alegría holding his feet to steady him (standard golf procedure), Tyurin’s single-handed shot saw a skewed ball leave the International Space Station.
Despite its wayward trajectory, it registered as a record for the longest golf shot in history, the ball subsequently burning up in Earth’s very own atmospheric ‘clubhouse’.
Football
Long before VAR was a glint in a referee’s eye, football featured on the International Space Station during the 2014 World Cup, as NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman and Steve Swanson and German ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst had a celestial kickabout.
A recent study has even looked at how future astronauts could play football on the Moon.
Baseball
The Space Station has also been the venue for another popular sport: a game of baseball, albeit one without the regulation nine players, when Japanese astronaut Satoshi Furukawa decided to play against himself.
In space ‘slow motion’, Furukawa first pitched the ball, then ‘swam’ to outpace it, grabbed a bat to take a swing, before attempting to field the strike off his own batting.
Chess
A more cerebral encounter was the epic 1970 game of chess entitled ‘Earth vs Space’.
Cosmonauts Andrian Nikolayev and Vitaly Sevastyanov put their Soyuz 9 on autopilot in orbit as they locked pawns with Viktor Gorbatko, a fellow cosmonaut, and Nikolai Kamanin, the head of the cosmonaut training programme, both back at mission control on Earth.
The six-hour game, played over radio with a real chess set on the spacecraft, ended in a draw.
As well as ‘outdoor’ and board games, reading, painting and catching up with family and friends back on Earth, astronauts are adept at finding ways to fill their rare moments of downtime.
But if all else fails, the view from the window is far from uninspiring!
What sport would you like to see astronauts play in space or on the Moon? Let us know by emailing contactus@skyatnightmagazine.com
This article appeared in the October 2024 issue of BBC Sky at Night Magazine
