Late Great Engineers: Gene Cernan - the last man on the Moon

as commander of the Apollo 17 mission Gene Cernan became the last person to

leave footprints on the Moon. Written by Nick Smith. 

Captain in the U.S. Navy, Gene Cernan left his mark on the history of exploration by flying three times in space, twice to the Moon. The second American to walk in space and the last human of only 12 to leave his footprints on the lunar surface, Cernan is one of the great unsung heroes of the Apollo program phase of the Space Age. He went into space as pilot on the Gemini 9A mission, as lunar module pilot on Apollo 10 and as commander of Apollo 17, the final Apollo lunar landing.

Cernan passionately believed that this era of extra-terrestrial travel was so far ahead of its time that that it would take a further “hundred years in the history of mankind before we look back and really understand the meaning of Apollo.” Speaking towards the end of his life, Cernan maintained that the technology and vision of such explorations were so ground-breaking that it was as if the great American President John F Kennedy had, “reached out into the twenty-first century where we are today, grabbed hold of a decade of time, slipped it neatly into the sixties and seventies and called it Apollo.”