Hello, welcome to the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service with me, Trisha

Penrose. I'm taking you back to 1971 when Alan B. Shepard played golf on the moon.

His daughter Laura Shepard Churchley was watching.

I know where the golf balls are. They're in a crater called Rob Marrow. Daddy wanted

to fly right pretty much from day one. He would ride his bike 10 miles to the airport and

he would wash airplanes. So finally, his mother booked a flight and gave daddy his first

ride on an airplane. He was very, very excited and that was kind of the beginning of flying

for him. Alan saw action with the Navy in World War II. He later became a naval aviator

and test pilot. Alan encouraged Laura's interest in space.

We had a telescope and we would look at stars and daddy would point out the constellations

and the planets and it was just great. But then one day we saw Sputnik and it turns

out, he told me, Laura, that is a rocket that the Russians have put into space. We need

to go into space.

In 1959, seven pilots with the right stuff were chosen to be America's first astronauts,

the Mercury Seven.

What is the right stuff? All the training gives these guys the right stuff. I met all the

other six astronauts, but I knew daddy would be first and daddy knew he would be first.

He had that right stuff in his thought, you see? When he told us that he had been selected

as an astronaut, it didn't make any sense to us and we could ask questions every night

at the dinner table.

In 1961, Shepa became the second man in space just three weeks after the Russian Yuri

Gagarin.

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