Space, The Final Fairway
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
In what will easily be the longest 6-iron shot in golf history, a Russian cosmonaut, Pavel Vinogradov, 52, is scheduled to hit a gold-plated golf ball this summer from a makeshift tee outside the International Space Station.
If all goes as planned, the 17,000 mph smash with a golf club will travel 2.1 billion miles in orbit before burning up in Earth’s atmosphere, giving a Canadian golf club manufacturer the kind of publicity that can’t be found back on Earth.
The out-of-this-world tee shot is the brainchild of an engineering professor at the University of Windsor in Canada, Nataliya Hearn, who is also president and chief executive of Toronto-based Element 21 Golf Company.
