The following is a statement released on the behalf of Gene Cernan’s family: The trip back to Earth and the splashdown in the South Pacific, on Dec. 19, 1972, went like clockwork.In the decades since the Apollo program, the wonder of America’s early achievements in space has been overtaken by space shuttles, international space stations, unmanned explorations of the solar system’s outer worlds and the possibility of a landing by humans on Mars.Captain Cernan’s name has sometimes been linked with Armstrong’s as the first and last humans to walk on the moon. In his first spaceflight, Gemini 9 in 1966, he joined Col. Thomas Stafford of the Air Force on a three-day orbital mission testing rendezvous and docking procedures. Here is a look at the 12 astronauts who walked on the lunar surface.Still, his mission was a technological triumph. It did everything but land. He was 82. Cernan was born on March 14, 1934, in Chicago, Illinois; he was the son of Rose (née Cihlar; 1898–1991) and Andrew George Cernan (1904–1967). His first wife was Barbara Jean Atchley, a flight attendant for Cernan died in a hospital in Houston on January 16, 2017, at the age of 82.Cernan, along with nine of his Gemini astronaut colleagues, was inducted into the A popular belief is that Cernan wrote his daughter's initials on a rock on the Moon, A recording of Cernan's voice during the Apollo 17 mission was sampled by "Cernan" redirects here. But with budget constraints and other worlds beckoning, his lofty hopes for another generation to return have not been realized. His father was of Slovak descent and his mother was of Czech ancestry. He was a Boy Scout and earned the rank of Second Class. At 32, he was the youngest American to go into space.His second spaceflight, with Colonel Stafford and Cmdr. NASA announced Cernan's death in a tweet Monday morning. But it did set records: the longest lunar landing flight (nearly 302 hours) and the longest lunar surface extravehicular activities (22 hours and 6 minutes). They divorced in 1981. Eugene A. Cernan, the commander of the Apollo 17 lunar-landing mission in 1972 and the last human to walk on the moon, died on Monday in Houston. It was the worst economic downturn in the history of the industrialized world. Before becoming an astronaut, Cernan graduated with a Cernan traveled into space three times and to the Moon twice; as pilot of During his naval career, Cernan logged more than 5,000 hours of flying time, including 4,800 hours in In October 1963, NASA selected Cernan as one of the Cernan was selected for the lunar module pilot position on the backup crew for Cernan turned down the opportunity to walk on the Moon as Lunar Module Pilot of Cernan's role as commander of Apollo 17 closed out the Apollo program's lunar exploration mission with a number of record-setting achievements.

In 1972, he commanded the Apollo 17 lunar-landing mission.The first and last men to walk on the moon, Neil Armstrong, left, and Mr. Cernan, appeared on Capitol Hill in 2011 to testify on human spaceflight. He founded the Cernan Corporation, an energy and aerospace consultant, in 1981 and was chairman of the Johnson Engineering Corporation from 1994 to 2000.Mr. He was 82. Discover what happened on this day.Eugene Andrew Cernan is part of the Silent Generation, wh…
While Apollo 17 conveyed the drama of televised moonwalks, the awesome historicity of the Armstrong flight had faded, along with public interest in lunar missions that by 1972 had begun to seem repetitive.Eugene A. Cernan, who died on Monday at the age of 82, was the last of a dozen men to leave footprints on the moon. His death was announced by … In 1976, he retired from the Navy and NASA and became an executive of Coral Petroleum in Houston. “And as we leave the moon and Taurus-Littrow, we leave as we came, and, God willing, we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind.”Dr. Eugene Cernan, who commanded NASA's Apollo 17 moon landing mission and was the last astronaut to walk on the moon, has died. Two other missions were lunar orbital test runs, and Apollo 13 was an aborted landing after a malfunction. Skimming the lunar surface in a rehearsal for the first manned landing, he erupted with salty language heard by millions when his craft briefly spun out of control.But he made spacewalks and romps over the lunar surface look routine, and in a way they were.Three and a half years after Neil A. Armstrong took mankind’s first step onto the lunar surface in 1969, Mr. Cernan, a Navy captain and one of the nation’s most experienced astronauts, landed with a geologist-astronaut near the Sea of Serenity in the final chapter of the Apollo program, America’s audacious venture to fulfill Captain Cernan was the last of 12 Americans to set foot on the moon in six Apollo landings.