American Rare Earths and Materials Corp. (fka AREM)

[Jo4321]

USA today Article, company name mentioned twice.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2006-11-22-iss-golf-stunt_x.htm

Cosmonaut hits golf ball during spacewalk outside ISS
Updated 11/22/2006 8:25 PM


SWINGS IN SPACE

Golf drive to be measured in miles, not yards

Element21: Canadian golf club manufacturer sponsors stunt

By Seth Borenstein, The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Cosmic duffer Mikhail Tyurin was late for his tee time in space Wednesday evening, but 220 miles above Earth there are no foursomes behind him pressuring him to get his golf shot off.
After fixing an overheating spacesuit and then a stuck exterior hatch, the spacewalk began 77 minutes behind schedule.

Because delays put his arrival at the tee in orbital darkness, Tyurin waited a bit until dawn hit the International Space Station to make his shot with a gold-plated six-iron. The promotion for a Canadian golf club manufacturer was to be the first task for Tyurin and U.S. astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria during a six-hour spacewalk.

At 7:57 p.m. ET, Tyurin took his swing.

"There it goes!" he said. "It went pretty far. It was an excellent shot.... I can still see it as a little dot moving away from us," Tyurin said after his strike.

The shot did not go in the full retrograde direction as intended, but a little to the side of the Zvezda service module.

He was instructed by Russian controllers to stow the club after one swing. Three were originally planned.

NASA's lead spacewalk flight director, Holly Ridings, said the golf ball likely would stay in space two to three days and travel close to a million miles.

After the stunt, the spacewalkers began their other jobs, including fixing a space station antenna and retrieving science experiments.

The spacewalk was postponed twice.

During preparation, Tyurin told flight controllers in Moscow that his spacesuit was too hot because of a kinked cooling hose. He got out of the suit in an airlock while engineers on the ground figured out what to do.

"Oh rats," Tyurin said. "What do we do?"

Tyurin said the suit cooled once he was out of it, but when he got in it, the hose bended and it did not work.

The astronauts also experienced some resistance during hatch opening. It is a common problem that has been encountered before during Russian spacewalks.

After a protective ring was installed around the hatch, the astronauts set up for Tyurin's golf stunt. Lopez-Alegria was supposed to take photos of the golf shot, but Tyurin needed his help to complete the swing. NASA in Houston

The golf manufacturer Element 21 paid an undisclosed sum for the stunt, which company officials have said commemorates the 35th anniversary of astronaut Alan Shepard's memorable golf swing on the moon during the Apollo 14 mission in 1971.

It follows other commercial ventures at the space station that the Russian space agency has allowed, sometimes to the chagrin of NASA, such as bringing aboard paying tourists. The cash-strapped Russians also have allowed Pizza Hut to paint its logo on a rocket and have a pizza delivered to the space station. And it once charged PepsiCo $5 million to have cosmonauts float a replica of a soda can outside the Mir space station.

NASA has taken a grin-and-bear-it attitude. The U.S. space agency is indebted to its Russian partner for flying U.S. astronauts to the space station while shuttles were grounded after the Columbia disaster.

The weight of the golf ball is 3 grams, only about 1/15th the weight of a normal golf ball. That's to minimize any damage had it actually struck something.

Contributing: Space.com, staff reports

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Posted 11/22/2006 6:59 PM ET