When Apollo 14 lifted off from Kennedy Space Center on January 31, 1971, it carried with it the weight of a program that had nearly been broken. The failure of Apollo 13 in April 1970 had shaken NASA and cast doubt over whether humans would ever land on the Moon again. Nine months of intensive investigation and spacecraft modification followed. When the count reached zero and the Saturn V rocket thundered off the pad at 4:03:02 in the afternoon Eastern time, carrying Commander Alan Shepard, Command Module Pilot Stuart Roosa, and Lunar Module Pilot Edgar Mitchell into orbit, the Apollo program was being given a second chance.
Alan Shepard was the most storied of the three. On May 5, 1961, he had become the first American to reach space, making a fifteen-minute suborbital arc aboard Freedom 7 as one of the original Mercury Seven astronauts. Then Ménière's disease — a debilitating inner ear disorder — had grounded him for years. He became Chief Astronaut, the administrative head of the Astronaut Office, watching others fly missions he had dreamed of leading. In 1968 he underwent experimental surgery that corrected the condition and restored him to flight status. When he climbed into the command module of Apollo 14, Shepard was 47 years old — the oldest American astronaut ever to fly at that time, and the man who would become the oldest person ever to walk on the Moon.
Stuart Roosa had followed a more unconventional path to NASA. Before joining the Air Force in 1953, he had been a smoke jumper — one of those extraordinarily brave firefighters who parachute into remote wilderness fires. He became a fighter pilot and completed the Aerospace Research Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in California in 1965 before being selected as a Group 5 astronaut the following year. Edgar Mitchell, aged 40 during the mission, had joined the Navy in 1952, served as a carrier-based fighter pilot, and similarly completed the ARPS program before his astronaut selection. Both had served on the support crew for Apollo 9.
The crew almost never reached the Moon. During the trans-lunar coast, mission controllers discovered that the abort switch on the lunar module was registering a contact that would have triggered an automatic abort just as the descent engine fired. Engineers and software specialists on the ground worked feverishly to devise a workaround, eventually finding a way to reprogram the onboard guidance computer to ignore the spurious signal. A second malfunction — a defective radar that failed to lock on during descent — was resolved by cycling the system on and off in a procedure improvised during the final approach. These in-flight solutions ensured that the mission would reach its destination rather than becoming, like Apollo 13, a near-miss added to history's footnotes.
Shepard and Mitchell landed in the Fra Mauro formation on February 5, 1971, the same highlands region that had been the intended target of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission. Fra Mauro was scientifically significant: it was believed to contain ancient impact ejecta from the formation of the Imbrium Basin, material that could provide a window into the earliest history of both the Moon and the inner solar system. The landing itself was precise, and within hours the two astronauts were suiting up for their first excursion on the surface.
Over the course of two moonwalks, Shepard and Mitchell collected 94.35 pounds — approximately 42.80 kilograms — of lunar rocks and soil samples and deployed a suite of scientific instruments including seismometers and other geophysical equipment. Their primary geological objective was to reach the rim of Cone Crater, a large impact feature whose walls were expected to expose deep layers of the Fra Mauro formation. The trek proved more difficult than anticipated. The rolling, featureless terrain made it nearly impossible to judge distances, and the two astronauts, lugging their equipment up the crater's slope, came tantalizingly close to the rim without realizing it. Mission controllers eventually called them back before their suits' consumable supply ran low. Later analysis of photographs and surface data confirmed they had come within about 20 to 30 meters of the rim — close enough to frustrate geologists who had hoped for samples from deeper layers.
Apollo 14 is perhaps best remembered by the general public for an event that had nothing to do with science. Near the end of the second moonwalk, with his tasks complete and a few minutes to spare, Alan Shepard produced a makeshift golf club he had secretly brought to the Moon — a six-iron head fitted to the handle of a soil-sampling tool — and two golf balls. He hit both, though his bulky spacesuit prevented him from taking a proper two-handed swing. The second ball, Shepard estimated, sailed for miles in the Moon's low gravity. The image of one of America's most distinguished test pilots and astronauts cheerfully playing golf on the lunar surface delighted audiences around the world and provided a rare moment of levity in an era of intense national stress.
While Shepard and Mitchell worked on the surface, Stuart Roosa orbited above in the Command and Service Module, conducting scientific observations and photography of the lunar terrain including reconnaissance of the future Apollo 16 landing site. Roosa had also brought approximately 500 seeds representing five species of trees — loblolly pine, sycamore, sweetgum, redwood, and Douglas fir — which spent the journey in the vacuum of his personal kit. After the mission, these seeds were germinated by the United States Forest Service, and the resulting seedlings — dubbed Moon trees — were distributed to state forestry programs, schools, and parks across the United States and around the world. Hundreds of Moon trees still stand today, living monuments to a voyage that repaired the confidence of a space program and extended human footprints across the lunar highlands.
