Apollo 14 astronauts Alan Shepard, Edgar Mitchell, and Stuart Roosa returned to Earth on February 9-11, 1971, splashing down in the South Pacific after a nine-day mission that included the third crewed Moon landing, at the Fra Mauro highlands originally targeted for the aborted Apollo 13. Shepard, America's first man in space a decade earlier, became the fifth person to walk on the Moon and famously hit two golf balls across the lunar surface.
Alan Shepard had been grounded for years by an inner-ear disorder called Ménière's disease before experimental surgery cleared him to fly again, making his Apollo 14 command especially personal: America's first astronaut, chosen for Freedom 7 in 1961, finally got his chance to walk on the Moon a full decade later, at age 47, the oldest astronaut to do so at that time.
On the lunar surface, Shepard smuggled along a modified six-iron club head that he attached to a sample-collection tool, and in a moment broadcast live to Earth, swung one-handed in his bulky spacesuit at two golf balls. The first shot squirted weakly; the second, he claimed, sailed for 'miles and miles' in the low lunar gravity, though later analysis suggested it traveled only a few hundred yards. The mission also carried Mitchell, who conducted a widely publicized (and scientifically inconclusive) private ESP experiment with associates on Earth during the flight, and Roosa, who orbited alone carrying tree seeds that would later be planted as 'Moon Trees' across the United States.