Ronald Evans (astronaut)

• 1. Introduction

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  Ronald Ellwin Evans Jr. is the last human being to orbit the Moon alone. On the 14th of December 1972, while his crewmates Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt descended to the lunar surface at Taurus-Littrow valley, Evans circled silently overhead in the Command Module America. He would do so 75 times, more than any person before or since, racking up 147 hours and 43 minutes in lunar orbit. Then, on the way home, he stepped outside the spacecraft in the deep void between the Moon and Earth to retrieve film canisters by hand. It remains one of only three spacewalks ever performed far from any planetary body.

  Who was the man inside America while the rest of the world watched his crewmates walk on the Moon? A Kansas kid who sold cigarettes from a vending machine to pay for college, who survived a mid-air collision and a crash landing during the Vietnam War, who was turned down by NASA the first time he applied, and who would end his days reciting Humpty Dumpty in Russian at a cosmonauts' dinner. This is the story of how Ronald Evans got to the Moon, what he did when he got there, and what happened after he came home.

• 2. A Kansas Boyhood

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  Ronald Evans was born on the 10th of November 1933, in St. Francis, Kansas, the son of Clarence Ellwin "Jim" Evans and Marie A. Evans. His early years were marked by hardship that the family could not outrun. When his younger brother Larry was diagnosed with liver cancer, the family pulled up stakes and moved to Topeka, Kansas, seeking medical treatment. Larry died in 1951, and his parents separated.

  Evans settled into life at Highland Park High School in Topeka. He joined the Student Council, led the Science Club, and played guard on the football team well enough to earn All-Conference recognition. His other brother, Dale, won a football scholarship to Kansas State University and later played professionally for the Denver Broncos before serving two tours of duty in Vietnam with the Marine Corps.

  The family had little money, so when Evans decided to study electrical engineering at the University of Kansas, he secured a scholarship from the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps to cover the costs. He joined the Sigma Nu fraternity and earned extra cash by selling Chesterfield cigarettes and installing a vending machine in the fraternity house. He also earned a place in three engineering honor societies: Sigma Tau, Tau Beta Pi, and Sigma Xi. A summer cruise aboard a destroyer minelayer to Europe and an introduction to naval aviation at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi in Texas pointed him toward his future. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering in June 1956.

• 3. Wings and War

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  Rear Admiral Frank P. Akers handed Evans his naval aviator certificate on the 12th of April 1957, in a ceremony attended by Janet Merle Pollom, the secretary from Forbes Air Force Base whom Evans had met during Christmas leave in Topeka. She pinned his wings to his uniform that day. They married later that year, on the 22nd of December 1957, at the Westminster Presbyterian Church of Topeka.

  Evans became a fighter pilot with Fighter Squadron 142, flying Vought F8U Crusaders out of Naval Air Station Miramar in California. He logged back-to-back Western Pacific deployments, completed correspondence coursework while at sea to earn a promotion to lieutenant, and eventually transitioned to instructing other pilots on the F8U Crusader with Fighter Squadron 124. In 1962 he entered the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, where his fellow students included Gene Cernan, Richard F. Gordon Jr., Paul J. Weitz, and Jack Lousma.

  While still at the Postgraduate School, Evans applied to become an astronaut for the first time. He made the final round of tests at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, alongside Cernan and Gordon. On October 14, both he and Cernan were pulled from class to take long-distance calls. Cernan's was from Deke Slayton, confirming his selection. Evans's was from Al Shepard, telling him he had not made the cut. He returned to his studies and graduated with a Master of Science degree in aeronautical engineering in 1964.

  He reapplied again in 1965, this time while serving on combat deployments aboard the Ticonderoga off the coast of South Vietnam. During a training exercise he collided mid-air with his wingman, Lieutenant Roy E. Miller, and had to land at Tan Son Nhut Air Base because his aircraft was too badly damaged to recover on a carrier. Days later he was back flying combat missions. On one flight his aircraft was hit by ground fire; on another, an electrical failure left a live bomb under his wing that he could not jettison, forcing a skidding landing on a wet Marston Mat runway at Cam Ranh Air Force Base, where he slid 20 feet off the end. The bomb did not explode. A sergeant handed him orders for astronaut selection tests while he was still in the base commander's office. Seventeen days after participating in an attack on Viet Cong units that earned him a Navy Commendation Medal, he received word on the 26th of March 1966 that he had been chosen. He was one of nineteen astronauts selected by NASA in April 1966, completing a seven-month combat tour with 112 missions and 2,084 hours of flight time, including 4,600 hours in jet aircraft.

• 4. Learning to Wait

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  Evans joined NASA as a Command/Service Module specialist, which Deke Slayton assigned based on each astronaut's stated preference. His first assignment was the support crew for Apollo 1, the mission that ended in a fire on the launch pad on the 27th of January 1967. Evans had been inside that spacecraft for a couple of hours the day before. He and his colleagues were told of the deaths of Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee when they landed at Ellington Air Force Base.

  The support crew roles Evans took on were, by the astronauts' own reckoning, the lowest rung on the ladder. They built and maintained mission rules, flight plans, and checklists; they worked in simulators; they set switches in cockpits before launches. Evans served in this role for Apollo 7, Apollo 11, and Apollo 14, and also operated as a capsule communicator for those missions, the voice of mission control in direct contact with the crews.

  His fortunes changed through a chain of decisions made by other people. Gene Cernan, unwilling to reprise his role as Lunar Module Pilot under John Young, held out for his own command. Michael Collins declined the chance to lead a Moon mission. These shifts opened a path for Cernan to lead the Apollo 14 backup crew, and Cernan chose Evans as his Command Module Pilot. Evans's selection to that backup crew was announced by NASA on the 6th of August 1969, the same year he was promoted to commander in the Navy. Whether the backup crew of Apollo 14 would rotate to the prime crew of Apollo 17 was far from guaranteed; pressure from the scientific community to send a geologist to the Moon threatened to displace pilot astronauts entirely, including Evans. When Harrison Schmitt was assigned to Apollo 17 as Lunar Module Pilot, the fate of Evans's own slot was tied directly to whether Cernan would remain as commander. Cernan stayed, and so did Evans. The prime crew of Apollo 17 was publicly announced on the 13th of August 1971.

• 5. Captain America

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  An estimated 700,000 people watched the night launch from Kennedy Space Center, the largest crowd of spectators since Apollo 11. Just before his helmet was attached, Evans smoked a last cigarette. His crewmates had urged him to quit, and Schmitt suggested the two-week mission was a good opportunity to go cold turkey.

  While Cernan and Schmitt explored the Taurus-Littrow valley on the lunar surface, Evans orbited alone in the Command Module America. His crewmates nicknamed him "Captain America," after the comic book character. The flight plan kept him fully occupied: visual geological observations, hand-held photography of specific targets, and control of the cameras and instruments in the service module's Scientific Instrument Module bay. He photographed craters Eratosthenes and Copernicus, the vicinity of Mare Orientale, and surface features lit only by Earthlight, using a technique that combined careful exposure settings with the faint glow reflected from Earth.

  He observed all ten visual targets assigned to him before launch and identified each one successfully. The lunar sounder in the SIM bay presented minor technical difficulties when one antenna indicator failed and the second antenna appeared to stall during deployment; both were ultimately deployed fully and the instrument achieved its planned purpose. The mapping camera took roughly four minutes to extend and retract rather than the nominal two, so Evans limited its use to avoid wearing it out.

  His most precise solo task was a plane change maneuver, firing the Service Propulsion System engine for about 20 seconds to align the Command Module's orbital path with the anticipated trajectory of the returning Lunar Module, setting up the rendezvous. He also recircularized the spacecraft's orbit immediately after the Lunar Module departed, keeping the Command Module at a stable altitude above the surface. By the time Cernan and Schmitt returned from the surface, Evans had logged 147 hours, 43 minutes, and 37.11 seconds in lunar orbit.

• 6. The Deepest Spacewalk

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  On the journey back to Earth from the Moon, Evans pulled on Gene Cernan's lunar visor assembly with its red stripe and the top portion of his crewmate's lunar backpack, then opened the hatch into the void between worlds. The extravehicular activity lasted one hour, five minutes, and 44 seconds.

  He made three separate trips to the Scientific Instrument Module bay to retrieve the lunar sounder film, the panoramic camera cassette, and three mapping camera cassettes. He also conducted a personal inspection of the equipment bay. Evans set up a movie camera and a television camera before he went out, so the spacewalk was broadcast live. It was the third deep space EVA in history and remains one of only three ever performed, all during Apollo's J-missions. It was also the final spacewalk of the entire Apollo program.

  After a total flight time of 301 hours, 51 minutes, and 59 seconds, America splashed down in the Pacific Ocean. The recovery ship was the Ticonderoga, the same carrier Evans had deployed on during the Vietnam War. When he climbed aboard, the first thing he asked a crew member for was a cigarette. His promotion to captain in the Navy was made official in January 1973. John Warner, the United States Secretary of the Navy, presented him with his Navy astronaut wings. The Apollo 17 crew were driven around the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum at Super Bowl VII and hosted by President Richard Nixon at the White House and Camp David. Evans and Cernan declined an invitation to meet Muhammad Ali, citing the boxer's 1967 refusal to serve in the armed forces, but the crew accepted hospitality from Frank Sinatra.

• 7. After the Moon

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  Evans's final NASA assignment was as backup Command Module Pilot for the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz Test Project mission, where the Russian he had studied years earlier at the Defense Language Institute at the Presidio of Monterey proved useful, if limited. Asked to deliver a speech at a cosmonauts' dinner, he recited Humpty Dumpty in Russian. His hosts found it hilarious. He retired from the Navy as a captain on the 30th of April 1976, after 21 years of service, and left NASA on the 8th of March 1977, after working on the launch and ascent phases of the Space Shuttle program.

  His post-NASA life in Scottsdale, Arizona, proved turbulent. He took a director of marketing role at Western America Energy Corporation but grew disillusioned and quit. He then joined Sperry Flight Systems, which made electronic components and cockpit instrumentation for the Space Shuttle, as Director of Space Systems Marketing. When the company president who had hired him died and Evans fell out with the successor, he left to form his own consulting company and built a partnership with a Japanese entrepreneur developing a space-exploration theme park.

  Evans died in his sleep of a heart attack at his home in Scottsdale on the 6th of April 1990, at the age of 56. He was buried at the Valley Presbyterian Church Memorial Garden in Paradise Valley, Arizona. Jan Evans marked the anniversaries of his birth, their marriage, his spaceflight, and his death by leaving a red rose at his grave. He was inducted into the International Space Hall of Fame in 1983 and into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame on the 4th of October 1997.