It was by no means the most elegant episode in golfing history when the cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin stepped up to the world’s highest tee, 220 miles (350km) above Earth. But then, the likes of Tiger Woods have never had to play upside-down, in zero gravity, with their caddies hanging on to their feet.
Dangling from a handrail outside the International Space Station, a slightly tetchy Mr Tyurin sliced the kind of one-handed shot that would normally have ended up in the rough. Last night his ball was still going strong, orbiting Earth once every 90 minutes.
“All right. There it goes,” Mr Tyurin, 46, exclaimed after he swatted the ball from a spring-loaded tee mounted on the side of the space station, using a gold-plated six-iron strapped to his wrist. He was nearly an hour late for his scheduled tee time because his £6 million spacesuit malfunctioned before he left the space station. Then he kept losing his stance as he tried to square up to the ball.
He complained to his spacewalking colleague, the American astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, of unconventional handicaps such as “My feet are drifting away”, “I’m afraid to move” and “Something’s in my way . . . is it you?” as the pair manoeuvred into position.
His patience was tested further by contributions from mission controllers in Korolev, Russia, such as “Make sure you don’t hit Michael.”
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Eventually, with Mr Lopez-Alegria clasping Mr Tyurin’s feet on to the rail to keep them in place, the Russian made his swing. “It went pretty far,” he observed, as the ball shot into the distance ten times faster than a bullet.
The Russian space agency, Roskosmos, which was paid millions by a Canadian golf club manufacturer to perform the shot, said that the ball would keep going for more than three years.
Nasa calculated that it would stay in space for three days before dropping into Earth’s atmosphere, where it would burn up. Nasa was concerned about the potential for a fatal catastrophe. If the ball hit the space station, it could do so with the force of a 20-tonne lorry travelling at 100mph.