Last man to walk on moon, Gene Cernan, dies

“Oh, my golly”, Cernan told mission control in Houston as he touched the moon.

After Apollo 17, Cernan continued working for NASA, serving on the planning team for the Apollo-Soyuz mission that saw an Apollo module rendezvous with a Russian vehicle in cis-Lunar space.

They gathered more than 220 pounds (100kg) of rocks during their 22 hours of exploring craters and hills. “Forever more, I would belong to the universe”. He was supported by lunar pilot, Harrison Schmitt and Ronald Evans who was pilot of the command module which orbited the moon while Cernan and Schmitt landed on the surface. The last time was in 1972, when he spent three days setting up experiments. He recalled the silence after the lunar lander’s engine shut down. He also said he wrote the letters TDC – for his then nine-year-old daughter, Teresa Dawn Cernan – on the dusty surface.

The former naval officer had the distinction of being the commander of the last human mission to the moon in December 1972. You’re not going to be better than everyone at everything.’ And he was right”, Cernan said, according to NPR, “I wasn’t.

“We shall return, in peace and hope, for all mankind”.

“When I was boarding the lunar module for the last time and I looked at my footprints, I knew I wouldn’t be coming back”.

The Apollo 17 crew returned to Earth on December 19, 1972.

Cernan was a Navy pilot before joining the space program, where he had an accomplished career.

“Those steps up that ladder, they were tough to make”. “I didn’t want to go up”. I wished I could have stayed awake for 75 hours straight.

Full oral history interview with Eugene Cernan.

Cernan was born on March 14, 1934.

It’s the reason he and Bryce Prior, both students in the Aerospace Engineering program, enrolled at Purdue.

NASA selected Cernan as one of 14 astronauts to join the agency in October 1963. He became a businessman and was a television commentator for the first space shuttle flights. His first mission to space was on Gemini 9, where he completed an extremely hard spacewalk – only the second to be attempted by an American.

But Cernan was also part of the key Apollo 10 mission that set the stage for the following Apollo 11 moon landing.