SPOIL A SPACEWALK

Cosmonaut tees off into space

At the start of a six-hour spacewalk, cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin hit a golf ball into Earth's orbit from the International Space Station (ISS) to raise money for the Russian space program.
The station flight engineer made a one-armed swat with a gold plated six-iron to send the lightweight ball on a journey estimated to take it around the Earth at least 48 times before it burns up in the atmosphere.
Mr Tyurin spent 16 minutes setting up the shot off a ladder on a Russian docking module, with the help of United States astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria and under the guidance of Russian flight controllers.

"Okay, there it goes," Mr Tyurin said. "It went pretty far. It was an excellent shot. I can still see it as a little dot moving away from us."

Cosmonaut's shanked space shot gives NASA yips

It may have been a golf shot that went around the world, but he fluffed it.
As he walked in space, 350 kilometres above the Pacific, the cosmonaut whacked an 3g ball into history.
But the $US5 million stunt, sponsored by a Canadian golf equipment manufacturer, immediately went into the rough.

Instead of going in a line opposite to the flight path of the international space station, the ball swerved unexpectedly to the side. Ground controllers declared Tyurin had "shanked" the shot and that the ball had zoomed far off course.

[He had been armed with three ultra-light balls, weighing just three grams each, but he was quickly ordered to put them away and get on with his real work, fitting new equipment outside the space station.
As he packed away his club, gold-plated to reduce static electricity, mission control reported that it was still trying to calculate the ball's trajectory.]