Apollo 16 astronaut almost lost his wedding ring in outer space

IT’S the worst nightmare of every married man.

Life is going along nice and smoothly, and then you lose your wedding ring.

What do you do?

Fortunately, we often manage to locate it, down the back of the sofa, in the loo at work, or the locker room at the sports centre, and we can finally relax again.

If, however, you lost your wedding ring while on an Apollo space mission, countless miles from home and out there in the pitch-black, endless space, you’d be in major trouble.

When Apollo 16 went off into the outer reaches in 1972, it was on an 11-day trip to the moon and back, with Ken Mattingly part of the crew as its command module pilot.

On their second day, Ken lost his wedding ring, recalling that it simply floated off and nobody on board could find it.

As the days went by and Ken and crew still failed to locate the missing band of gold, he began to think about excuses.

After three days on the moon alongside Commander John Young and lunar module pilot Charlie Duke, the crew still had seen no sign of the ring.

When they began the long journey home to their own planet, poor Ken had given up any hope of finding it. Nine days on, the team went outside their craft for a space walk.

With the hatch open, Ken was floating alongside the spaceship, conducting a scientific experiment, while anchored to a pole.

Duke floated out to check how he was getting on, and the pair of them marvelled at the view, with the moon now 50,000 miles away over Ken’s shoulder.

To his lower right was planet Earth, but it was something much smaller that caught his eye.

There, floating ever so slowly out of the door, was his lost wedding ring.

He reached out to grab it, but everything up there seems to happen in slow motion, and he failed.

Then he realised it was floating towards the back of Duke’s helmeted head!

Duke was blissfully unaware, too busy doing an experiment of his own, but he turned when the ring hit his helmet and had the presence of mind to grab it before it headed off into darkness for all time.

Now 80, Ken spent the rest of his career as a Space Shuttle development manager, but never forgot the time he lost his band of gold in space, but found it again.

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