You may have heard that fifty years ago, two astronauts in the final moments of their trip to the Moon tried to break the records of the regular Olympics by holding the “Moon Olympics”. But you may not know that this experiment nearly ended with the death of an astronaut…
Apollo 16 astronaut Charlie Duke told Business Insider: “It’s 1972 and it was the Olympics in Munich. We wanted to do the Moon Olympics.”
Duke and his commander, John Young, attempted several Earth events, knowing that reduced gravity (about one-sixth of Earth’s) would aid their attempt to break World records. In one of the events, Young threw a piece of equipment that was no longer needed like a javelin. Another attempt was the long jump.
Although they didn’t know it at the time, they learned that the high jump was too dangerous to be attempted on the Moon. Years later, in his book, Young said, “I decided to try and I took a big jump, reaching a height of about 1.2 meters,” and continued: “But when I got up, the weight of my backpack pulled me back. I was falling on my back. Filled with fear, I fell hard from a height of 1.2 meters onto my backpack.”
“Panic!” Young continues: “The thought of dying flashed through my mind. It was the only time during our stay on the moon that I had a real moment of panic and thought I had killed myself. The suit and backpack were not designed to support a drop of 1.2 meters. I would have lost my air. A quick decompression or, as a friend said, high altitude hiss and I would have died instantly. Fortunately, everything managed to hold together.”
Actually, this was not the first Lunar Olympics to be held. First attempt, a year ago on February 6, 1971, astronauts Alan Shepard and Ed Mitchell
Their first shot didn’t go well, the ball grazed the ball; was only a few steps away. He managed to hit the ball properly on the third hit and the ball flew in a fairly low trajectory. Shepard believed that the ball traveled “for miles”. He didn’t perform badly in his next shot either.
The second cannon was found by his astronaut friend Edgar Mitchell in a nearby crater, but the first was not found until half a century later, when imaging expert Andy Saunders digitally scanned the original film taken during Apollo 14. Saunders’ analysis revealed that the ball never traveled far, despite the low gravity on the Moon, rather than the “kilometers” Shepard thought it would reach. “We can now determine quite accurately that ball number one traveled 24 yards [22 yards] and ball number two traveled 40 yards [36 yards],” Saunders
wrote in a statement to the USG.
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