Last man to walk on moon dies.
Astronaut’s passion for lunar exploration never grew old
Former astronaut Gene Cernan, the last person to walk on the moon who returned to Earth with a message of “peace and hope for all mankind,” died on Monday in Texas following ongoing heath issues, his family said. He was 82.
Cernan was with his relatives when he died at a Houston hospital, family spokeswoman Melissa Wren said. His family said his passion for lunar exploration never waned.
“Even at the age of 82, Gene was passionate about sharing his desire to see the continued human exploration of space and encouraged our nation’s leaders and young people to not let him remain the last man to walk on the Moon,” his family said in a statement.
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. It was a moment that forever defined him.
“Those steps up that ladder, they were tough to make,” Cernan recalled in a 2007 oral history. “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 — still visible on the moon.
Cernan died less than six weeks after another American space hero, John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962. Their flights weren’t the first or last of the Mercury and Apollo eras. Yet to the public they were the bookends of America’s space age glory, starting with Godspeed John Glenn and ending with Cernan’s footprints on the moon.
On Dec. 11, 1972, Cernan guided the lander, named Challenger, into a lunar valley called Taurus-Littrow, with Harrison 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. 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.