Teeing off in space
Watch the video of the shot

Golf is an unforgiving game, wherever you play it.

In tricky conditions this morning, Mikhail Tyurin, an experienced Russian cosmonaut wearing an overheating space suit, did his best to address a ball. He was strapped upside-down to the International Space Station as it orbited Earth at 17,500 miles an hour.

His mission controllers were debating whether the ball, specially lightened for the absence of any course, was sitting straight on the tee.

"My legs are drifting away," said Flight Engineer Tyurin.

"Make sure you don’t hit Michael," he was told, warning him not to whack Commander Michael Lopez-Alegria, an American astronaut and caddy who was trying to attach his Russian colleague to a ladder.

By this point, the ISS was over eastern China and, because of a stuck hatch, Mr Tyurin was more than an hour late for his tee-off time. And there was still an antenna for the unpiloted cargo carrier to fix and a neutron experiment to set up.

"The ball is the least of our concerns," he said, revealing himself as more astronaut than sportsman. "It’s me that is supposed to be positioned properly."

And with that he edged over the ball, or under it, and after a couple of experimental swishes with a gold-plated six iron provided by a Canadian golf manufacturer which funded the stunt set himself for the first shot in space since 1971.

Barely visible in the bottom corner of grainy footage shown by Nasa, his commentary ran: "Ready... set... I assume the position the way it should be... Ba! Ba!... All right there it goes... It went pretty far... It was an excellent shot!... I can see it as a little dot moving away from us."

The ball did zip off, safely avoiding a collision with the $30 billion space station, but unfortunately Mr Tyurin, who didn't bother with two other shots that he could have taken, was the only one who saw a perfect drive. Everyone else who watched the longest shot in the history of the game couldn't help a wince: he shanked it.

"The ball left the station toward the right side instead of to the rear, a substantial slice," was Nasa's description of the highlight of the first spacewalk of Expedition 14 to the ISS.

Even though it was mis-hit, the ball is now expected to fly for billions of yards, although scientists differ quite how far. Nasa, which took a dim view of the exercise, has estimated that it will travel for three days around Earth before burning up in the atmosphere, a distance of 2.2 billion yards or 1.26 million miles.

The Russian space agency, meanwhile, says that the ball could travel for more than three years — or 810 billion yards (460 million miles). Either way, Mr Tyurin, a newcomer to the game who received training from the American ladies golfer, Carol Mann, and the US PGA Director of Instruction, Rick Martino, can be pleased that he managed to carry out the shot at all.

The rest of the five-and-a-half-hour spacewalk was plagued by minor annoyances. First an awkward hatch would not budge, then a kinked hose caused Mr Tyurin's spacesuit to heat up. Later on, water fogged up his visor. Although he and Mr Lopez-Alegria managed to install the neutron experiment to monitor solar bursts, they failed to dislodge a stuck antenna, despite several heaves.

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