‘‘He’s your classic sort of handsome debonair flyboy,’’ said space historian Roger Launius, associate director of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. Cernan had the looks of an astronaut from central casting. He had been a Navy attack pilot and earned a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering when NASA selected him in 1963 as one of 14 members of its third astronaut class. Cernan was born in 1934 in Chicago and graduated from Indiana’s Purdue University in 1956 with a degree in electrical engineering. 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.’ ’’Įugene A.
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 later acknowledged that he had grasped for words to leave behind, knowing how the world remembered Neil Armstrong’s ‘‘giant leap for mankind’’ on stepping on the moon in 1969.īefore heading home, Mr. ‘‘We leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind,’’ Mr. 14, Schmitt returned to the lunar module and was followed by Mr. I knew when I left I’d never have a chance to come back.’’Ĭompleting their third moon walk on Dec. I wished I could have stayed awake for 75 hours straight. ‘‘To go a quarter of a million miles away into space and have to take time out to sleep and rest. . . it was just to look back at the overwhelming and overpowering beauty of this Earth.’’ ‘‘But if I had to focus on one thing. . . ‘‘In that whole three days, I don’t think there’s anything that became routine,’’ Mr. 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. Evans remained behind as pilot of the command module that orbited the moon while the other two landed on the moon’s surface. Cernan, Schmitt and Ronald Evans had blasted off atop a Saturn rocket in the first manned nighttime launch from Kennedy Space Center. It’s a realization, a reality, all of a sudden you have just landed in another world on another body out there (somewhere in the) universe, and what you are seeing is being seen by human beings - human eyes - for the first time.’’ ‘‘That’s where you experience the most quiet moment a human being can experience in his lifetime,’’ Mr. He recalled the silence after the lunar lander’s engine shut down. Cernan guided the lander, named Challenger, into a lunar valley called Taurus-Littrow, with Harrison ‘‘Jack’’ Schmitt at his side. ‘‘When I leave this planet, I want to know where we are headed as a nation. Cernan testified before Congress in 2011.
And God help us if they’re not Americans,’’ Mr. ‘‘Neil and I aren’t going to see those next young Americans who walk on the moon. But as the years went by he realized he wouldn’t live to witness someone follow in his footsteps, which are still visible on the moon more than 40 years later. Cernan tried to ensure he wasn’t the last person to walk on the moon, testifying before Congress to push for a return. It’s like you would want to freeze that moment and take it home with you. Cernan called it ‘‘perhaps the brightest moment of my life. . . ‘‘Those steps up that ladder, they were tough to make,’’ Mr. It was a moment that forever defined him in both the public eye and his own. 14, 1972, tracing his only child’s initials in the dust before climbing the ladder of the lunar module the last time. He became the last person to walk on the moon on Dec. Cernan, commander of NASA’s Apollo 17 mission, set foot on the lunar surface in December 1972 during his third space flight. NEW YORK - Former astronaut Gene Cernan, who was the last of only a dozen men to walk on the moon and who returned to Earth with a message of ‘‘peace and hope for all mankind,’’ died Monday.
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