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January 18, 2017

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Last moonwalking astronaut dies

EUGENE Cernan, the last astronaut to walk on the moon — an experience that he said made him “belong to the universe,” died on Monday at the age of 82, the US space agency said.

Cernan, who was also the second man to walk in space, died surrounded by his family, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said in a short statement. A separate statement from his family and released by NASA said his death came after “ongoing health issues.”

Cernan and fellow Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt became members of the most exclusive club in the universe on December 11, 1972, when they stepped from their lunar landing module onto the moon’s surface. Only 10 other people — all American astronauts — had done so before and none since.

“Oh, my golly,” Cernan told mission control in Houston as he touched the moon. “Unbelievable.”

For three days, the moon was home for Cernan and Schmitt. They rambled more than 30 kilometers in their lunar roving vehicle and gathered more than 100 kilograms of rocks during their 22 hours of exploration of craters and hills. “I knew that I had changed in the past three days and that I no longer belonged solely to the Earth,” Cernan wrote in a memoir titled “The Last Man on the Moon.” “Forever more, I would belong to the universe.”

Cernan was 38 years old when he blasted off for the moon on December 7, 1972, as commander of Apollo 17. With Ronald Evans orbiting above in the command module, Cernan and Schmitt, a geologist, rode the lunar lander to the moon’s surface four days later.

They explored for about seven hours each day and Cernan wrote that moonwalking was painful for him because he had injured a leg tendon two months earlier playing softball.

The size 10-1/2 boot prints that Cernan made on his walk back to the module afterward marked the last steps man has taken on the moon. Apollo 17 was Cernan’s last flight as an astronaut after 566 hours and 15 minutes in space.

Cernan was born on March 14, 1934, and grew up near Chicago. He was in the military officers training program at Purdue University, where he first met Neil Armstrong, who would become the first moonwalker.

Cernan became a Navy test pilot and joined the astronaut corps in October 1963. His first space flight came three years later due to a tragedy. Cernan and Thomas Stafford had been designated to be the backups for Gemini 9 and had to take over the three-day mission when the original crew members were killed in a plane crash.

Cernan became the third person — following a Russian cosmonaut and US astronaut Ed White — to make a spacewalk on the Gemini mission and set what was then a record by being outside the spacecraft for two hours and nine minutes.

Cernan met his first wife, Barbara, a flight attendant for Continental Airlines, on a plane. They divorced in 1981 after 20 years and one child and in 1987 he married Jan Nanna with whom he had two daughters.




 

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