‘The last man to walk on the moon’
Astronaut urged NASA to revive lunar program for humankind
He was immortalized as “the last man to walk on the moon,” but in 1972, shortly after completing the Apollo 17 mission, astronaut Gene Cernan predicted many others would follow.
He didn’t want the title. He wanted others to feel the rush of stepping onto the lunar surface.
The thrill of gazing back at Earth.
“Now here we are today, and I’ve accepted the fact that it’s going to be a while longer now than I anticipated,” Cernan told the Houston Chronicle in 2011. “I’m probably not going to be around when that happens, which is a little disappointing. But it will happen, because there are all kinds of good reasons to do it.”
On Monday, more than 44 years after tracing his daughter’s initials into the moon’s surface and climbing aboard the lunar module for the last time, Cernan died surrounded by family in Houston. He was 82. In a statement, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden called Cernan “a patriot and pioneer who helped shape our country’s bold ambitions to do things that humankind had never before achieved.”
A month ago, Cernan had mourned the death of fellow astronaut John Glenn, calling it “a great loss” for the country. Like Glenn, he too had been battling “ongoing health issues,” Cernan’s family said in a statement, sharing no additional details.
He had struggled quietly. Out of the spotlight. After a lifetime in the public eye, that’s where Cernan liked to spend much of his time in recent years, said Mark Craig, a filmmaker who told Cernan’s story in the 2014 documentary, “The Last Man on The Moon.” Craig and his team spent months filming Cernan in Houston, where he had lived since 1964, and at his secluded ranch in Kerrville, where he liked to get away.
Craig didn’t know Cernan, the astronaut, he said. He only knew Cernan, the gray-haired man in a dusty ball cap and blue jeans who liked to ride horses and walk with his dogs through the Texas Hill Country.
“He told me once that he understood that to technically qualify as a Texan, you had to be born there,” Craig said of Cernan, who was born in Chicago. “As far as he was concerned, he was a Texan in his own mind. He loved the state.”
Elder Bush was a fan
President George H.W. Bush issued a statement, calling him a true friend: “By his courage, Gene Cernan secured a place in American history that, like the footprints he left on the moon, will never fade.”
Like Bush, Cernan remained active well into his 70s and early 80s, Craig said.
“I flew with him in his plane,” he said. “He was still flying aircraft. He was still riding horses. Still hanging out with the guys and drinking beers and such a lot of fun. He just refused to be limited or restricted by age or health issues.”
Eugene A. Cernan was born in 1934 and graduated from Indiana’s Purdue University in 1956 with a degree in electrical engineering. He was serving as a Navy attack pilot in 1963 when NASA selected him as one of 14 members of its third astronaut class.
Cernan had the looks of an astronaut from central casting.
“He’s your classic sort of handsome debonair flyboy,” said space historian Roger Launius, associate director of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.
In 1966, Cernan was pilot of Gemini 9, a three-day flight with command pilot Tom Stafford where they used different techniques to rendezvous with a docking adapter that was previously launched. On the flight, Cernan became the second American to walk in space, spending more than two hours outside the Gemini spacecraft.
With the Apollo program underway, Cernan flew on Apollo 10 in May 1969. It was a dress rehearsal for the lunar landing on the next flight and took Cernan and Stafford to within 9½ miles of the moon’s surface.
Cernan often joked that his job was to paint a white line to the moon that Neil Armstrong and the rest of the Apollo 11 crew could follow. Yet Cernan was one of only three people to voyage twice to the moon — either to its surface or in moon orbit.
Moon footprints still visible
At the end of his second visit during the Apollo 17 mission, on Dec. 14, 1972, he became the last person to walk on the moon, saying as he left: “We leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind.”
It was a moment that forever defined him in both the public eye and his own.
“Those steps up that ladder, they were tough to make,” Cernan said in a 2007 oral history. “I didn’t want to go up. I wanted to stay a while.”
Decades later, Cernan tried to ensure he wasn’t the last person to walk on the moon, testifying before Congress to push for a return.
But as the years went by, he realized he wouldn’t live to witness someone follow in his footsteps, which are visible on the moon more than 40 years later.
In 1973, Cernan became special assistant to the program manager of the Apollo program at Johnson Space Center, assisting in planning and development of the U.S.Soviet Apollo-Soyuz mission.
He retired from NASA three years later. He worked for a Houston energy firm, Coral Petroleum, then in 1981 began his own aerospace consulting company. He eventually became chairman of an engineering firm that worked on NASA projects. He also worked as a network television analyst during shuttle flights in the 1980s.
In a statement Monday, Cernan’s family said he had been “a loving husband, father, grandfather, brother and friend.”
In the final passage of his 1999 memoir, Cernan wrote about trying to explain his experience walking on the moon in terms his then 5-year-old granddaughter could understand.
“Your Popie went to heaven,” he’d told her. “He really did.”