Gene Cernan

• 1. Introduction

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  Gene Cernan stepped off the lunar surface on the 14th of December 1972, climbed the ladder of the Apollo 17 lunar module, and has not been followed by any human being since. More than half a century later, those footprints in the Taurus-Littrow valley remain, and Cernan remains the last person to have stood on the Moon. Born on the 14th of March 1934 in Chicago, Illinois, to a family of Slovak and Czech descent, he grew up in the Illinois towns of Bellwood and Maywood before studying electrical engineering at Purdue University in Indiana. He would go on to travel to space three times and to the Moon twice, logging records that no subsequent mission has broken. But the record that defines him is the one he never sought: walking out last, turning around, and leaving. Before he climbed that ladder for the final time, he spoke words that are still, to this day, the last spoken by a human being standing on another world. How did a kid from Bellwood end up holding that distinction? And what did it cost him to get there?

• 2. From Illinois to Naval Aviation

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  Cernan graduated from Proviso Township High School in Maywood in 1952 and arrived at Purdue carrying enough ambition to fill several honor societies at once. He served as treasurer of the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity, president of the Quarterdeck Society and the Scabbard and Blade, and was a member of the Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society, the Skull and Crescent leadership honor society, and the military ball committee. After his sophomore year, he accepted a partial Navy ROTC scholarship that required him to serve aboard ship between his junior and senior years. He finished in 1956 with a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering and a GPA of 5.1 out of 6.0.

  Commissioned as an Ensign through the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps at Purdue, Cernan moved through flight training at Whiting Field in Florida, Barron Field in Texas, NAS Corpus Christi in Texas, and NAS Memphis in Tennessee. He trained on the T-28 Trojan, the T-33 Shooting Star, and the F9F Panther before flying FJ-4 Fury and A-4 Skyhawk jets in Attack Squadrons 126 and 113. By the end of his naval career he had logged more than 5,000 hours of flying time, including 4,800 hours in jet aircraft, and had made at least 200 successful carrier landings. In 1963, he completed a Master of Science degree in aeronautical engineering from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, the same year NASA came calling.

• 3. Learning to Walk in Space

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  In October 1963, NASA selected Cernan as one of the third group of astronauts for the Gemini and Apollo programs. His first mission began under tragic circumstances. The prime crew for Gemini 9 was Elliot See and Charles Bassett, who were killed on the 28th of February 1966 when their NASA T-38A aircraft crashed at Lambert Field in Missouri. That accident made Cernan and Thomas Stafford the prime crew, marking the first time in NASA history that a backup crew had been elevated that way.

  Gemini 9A encountered serious problems from the start. The original target vehicle exploded during launch. A substitute target vehicle was available, but the protective shroud around its docking collar failed to separate, making docking impossible. The crew compared the shroud's stuck configuration to an angry alligator. Cernan then performed the second American EVA, the third spacewalk in history, stepping outside into a void with no adequate restraints to hold his limbs in place. The physical exertion was extreme. Without the ability to brace himself, he overheated inside his suit and his visor fogged, forcing the early termination of the spacewalk before he could test the Astronaut Maneuvering Unit. The mission was difficult, but it taught NASA hard lessons that would inform every EVA that followed.

• 4. Almost to the Surface

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  Apollo 10, which flew from the 18th to the 26th of May 1969, was the full dress rehearsal for the first Moon landing, and Cernan flew it as Lunar Module Pilot alongside commander Tom Stafford. The two men piloted the Lunar Module, named Snoopy, to within 8.5 nautical miles of the lunar surface, executing every phase of a lunar landing up to final powered descent. They gathered critical data on technical systems and the Moon's gravitational conditions that gave Apollo 11 planners the confidence to attempt the real landing two months later.

• 5. The Fight for Apollo 17

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  Cernan turned down the chance to walk on the Moon as Lunar Module Pilot of Apollo 16. He wanted to command his own mission, and he was willing to risk being left off a flight entirely to get that chance. Standard crew rotation put him in line to command Apollo 17, but the path there was contested. When the Apollo 18 and Apollo 19 missions were cancelled in September 1970, the scientific community pushed hard to place Harrison Schmitt, the only professional geologist in the active astronaut roster, on the final lunar mission. In August 1971, NASA named Schmitt as Lunar Module Pilot for Apollo 17, which meant the original LM pilot, Joe Engle, lost his seat.

  Cernan fought to keep his original crew. When NASA made clear that Schmitt would join the crew with or without Cernan's agreement, Cernan chose to accept Schmitt rather than lose his command entirely. He did not merely tolerate the arrangement. He came to conclude that Schmitt was an outstanding LM pilot, while Engle, despite an exceptional record as a test pilot, was merely an adequate one. That reassessment mattered, because on the surface of the Moon, a geologist who could read the landscape in real time proved to be exactly what the mission needed.

• 6. Three Days at Taurus-Littrow

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  Apollo 17 landed in the Taurus-Littrow valley in December 1972, and Cernan and Schmitt spent three days on the surface, from the 11th to the 14th of December. They conducted three separate EVAs totaling about 22 hours of surface exploration. Their first EVA alone was more than three times the total time Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin spent outside the lunar module on Apollo 11.

  Cernan drove the Lunar Roving Vehicle across the valley floor, and at one point pushed the rover to a maximum speed of 11.2 miles per hour, giving him what the records describe as the unofficial lunar land speed record. Together he and Schmitt covered more than 35 kilometers using the rover. Their geological collection came to 110.4 kilograms of samples, the most of any Apollo mission, material that would help scientists understand the Moon's early history.

  Before climbing the ladder for the last time, Cernan wrote his daughter Tracy's initials in the lunar dust as he walked from the rover back to the lunar module. Then he spoke his farewell. The words he left behind were not scripted by NASA press officers. He spoke directly to capcom Bob Parker, saying: "Bob, this is Gene, and I'm on the surface; and, as I take man's last step from the surface, back home for some time to come - but we believe not too long into the future - I'd like to just (say) what I believe history will record: that America's challenge of today has forged man's destiny of tomorrow. And, as we leave the Moon at Taurus-Littrow, we leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind. Godspeed the crew of Apollo 17."

• 7. After the Moon

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  Cernan retired from the Navy in 1976 with the rank of captain, the same year he left NASA, and moved into private business. He became Executive Vice President of Coral Petroleum Inc. before founding his own company, The Cernan Corporation, in 1981. That same year he joined Frank Reynolds and Jules Bergman for ABC's coverage of the first three Space Shuttle launches. From 1987, he contributed regularly to ABC News and appeared on the weekly Good Morning America segment called "Breakthrough", which covered health, science, and medicine.

  In 1999, he published his memoir with co-author Donald A. Davis under the title The Last Man on the Moon. A documentary of the same name, made by British filmmaker Mark Craig, followed in 2014 and received the Texas Independent Film Award from the Houston Film Critics Society and the Movies for Grownups Award from AARP The Magazine.

  Cernan was not content to stay quiet when he believed the space program was going in the wrong direction. In 2010, he and Neil Armstrong testified before Congress in opposition to the cancellation of the Constellation program, which had aimed to return humans to the Moon. Cernan also warned against what he called the untested assumptions of commercial spaceflight companies, saying they "do not yet know what they don't know." His view shifted after SpaceX venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson briefed him on the company's work while seeking Cernan's signature for a photograph honoring the first successful SpaceX cargo mission to the International Space Station in 2012. Cernan eventually signed. Purdue University, which produced both Cernan and Neil Armstrong, can claim the alma mater of both the first and the last persons to walk on the Moon.

• 8. Legacy and Last Words

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  Cernan died in a hospital in Houston on the 16th of January 2017, at the age of 82. His funeral was held at St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Houston, and he was buried with full military honors at Texas State Cemetery on the 25th of January 2017, the first astronaut to be interred there.

  His voice had already traveled further than most people knew. A recording from the Apollo 17 mission was sampled by Daft Punk for "Contact", the closing track of their 2013 album Random Access Memories. His last words from the lunar surface, together with Harrison Schmitt's recollections, were used by the band Public Service Broadcasting for the song "Tomorrow", the final track of their 2015 album The Race for Space. In the 1998 HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon, Cernan was portrayed by Daniel Hugh Kelly. The Apple TV+ series For All Mankind drew its fictional commander of the Apollo 17 mission to share qualities with Cernan.

  He is one of only three astronauts who traveled to the Moon twice, alongside Jim Lovell and John Young. He is the only person to have flown in two different Apollo Lunar Modules in space while not docked to the Apollo Command and Service Module, both times near the Moon. The S.S. Gene Cernan, an Orbital ATK Cygnus cargo spacecraft named in his honor, launched to the International Space Station on the 12th of November 2017, ten months after his death.