Gene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, dies

HOUSTON—Former astronaut Gene Cernan, who as the last person to walk on the moon returned to Earth with a message of “peace and hope for all mankind,” died on Monday, his family said. He was 82.

Cernan was with his relatives when he died at a Houston hospital following ongoing heath issues, family spokeswoman Melissa Wren told The Associated Press. His family said his devotion to lunar exploration never waned.

Cernan was commander of NASA’s Apollo 17 mission and on his third space flight when he set foot on the lunar surface in December 1972. He became the last of only a dozen men to walk on the moon on Dec. 14, 1972— tracing his only child’s initials in the dust before climbing the ladder of the lunar module the last time.

“Those steps up that ladder, they were tough to make,” Cernan recalled in a 2007 oral history. “I didn’t want to go up. I wanted to stay a while.”

Cernan called it “perhaps the brightest moment of my life.

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—still visible on the moon more than 40 years later.

“Neil (Armstrong, who died in 2012) and I aren’t going to see those next young Americans who walk on the moon. And God help us if they’re not Americans,” Cernan testified before Congress in 2011.

On Dec. 11, 1972, Cernan guided the lander, named Challenger, into a lunar valley called TaurusLittrow, with Harrison “Jack” Schmitt at his side. He recalled the silence after the lunar lander’s engine shut down.

“That’s where you experience the most quiet moment a human being can experience in his lifetime,” Cernan said in 2007. “There’s no vibration. There’s no noise. The ground quit talking. Your partner is mesmerized. He can’t say anything.”

Three days earlier, Cernan, Schmitt and Ronald Evans had blasted off atop a Saturn rocket in the first manned nighttime launch from Kennedy Space Center. Evans remained behind as pilot of the command module that orbited the moon while the other two landed on the moon’s surface. Cernan and Schmitt, a geologist, spent more than three days on the moon, including more than 22 hours outside the lander, and collected 249 pounds of lunar samples.

“To go a quarter of a million miles away into space and have to take time out to sleep and rest … I wished I could have stayed awake for 75 hours straight,” he said. “I knew when I left I’d never have a chance to come back.”

Completing their third moon walk on Dec. 14, Schmitt returned to the lunar module and was followed by Cernan.

“We leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind,” Cernan said.

Before heading home, Cernan said he drew the letters “TDC”— the initials of his then 9-year-old daughter, Teresa Dawn—with his finger on the dusty gray lunar surface. He said he imagined someone in the distant future would find “our lunar rover and our footprints and those initials and say, ‘I wonder who was here? Some ancient civilization was here back in the 20th century, and look at the funny marks they made.’”

Eugene A. Cernan was born in 1934 in Chicago and graduated from Indiana’s Purdue University in 1956 with a degree in electrical engineering. (Armstrong also was a Purdue grad.)