This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this folio. Terms of use.

Out of all the billions of people who have lived on Earth, only 12 of them walked on the moon. Yesterday, on Martin Luther King Solar day, the concluding man to set foot on the moon passed away. Apollo astronaut Eugene Cernan was 82 at the fourth dimension of his expiry, but in 1972 at the age of 38 he had the great and sorrowful honor of being the last man to set foot on the moon.

Cernan began his career as a Naval Aviator flying FJ-iv Fury and A-4 Skyhawk jets. In a few year'due south he'd exist flying something with a petty more power. His time at NASA started with the Gemini program, the forerunner to Apollo. Gemini was geared toward working out how humans could survive in space. Cernan was originally a backup pilot for Gemini 9, but the principal crew was tragically lost in a airplane crash four months before launch. That left Cernan every bit the pilot and Thomas Stafford as the command airplane pilot on Gemini 9A. That missions successfully completed 47 orbits of the Earth and included a 2-hr spacewalk.

In addition to being the last man to walk on the moon, Cernan has the distinction of being one of only iii people to travel to the moon twice. His commencement Apollo mission was Apollo x, which you might recognize as the mission before the famous moon landing with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.

Apollo 10 launched in May of 1969, just a few months before Apollo 11. It was basically a clothes rehearsal for the bodily moon landing that was to follow. The craft orbited the moon and Cernan took the LM downward to the moon as if it was going to state, just merely to an altitude of viii.4 nautical miles. That's where the powered descent to the surface would take place, only Apollo 10 was just in that location to test the system, non land. In fact, NASA didn't completely fuel the LM in guild to discourage the coiffure from deciding to merely set down on the surface and stick their tongues out at Mission Control. Technically, they could have landed, just they wouldn't have been able to lift off again.

Cernan

Cernan finally got to gear up human foot on the moon as commander of Apollo 17 (seen above after a stroll on the moon), the final manned mission to the lunar surface. The mission reached the moon's surface on Dec 19th, 1972. The crew had known since 1970 that Apollo 17 was slated to be the final manned mission to the moon, but that was just Apollo. Mayhap Eugene Cernan didn't realize that no one would be dorsum to the moon for the residuum of his life when he stepped off the lunar surface that day, but hither we are decades later and confined to low-Globe orbit.

In that location are currently only half dozen living humans who take walked on the moon: Buzz Aldrin, Alan Bean, Charles Duke, Harrison Schmitt (who was on Apollo 17 with Cernan), John Young, and David Scott. They're all in their eighties now.