The last man on the Moon is ready to give up his title
Captain Eugene Cernan has been the “last man to walk on the Moon” for 37 years and he is ready to hand the title on to someone else. “I’ve held it for far too long,” he laughs, referring to the description, adding, “I am extremely confident that we will see a man – or a woman – from this present generation of young people back on the Moon.”
Gene Cernan has long been an outspoken advocate for increased space exploration and wants current and future generations to have the opportunities that he and his colleagues had. “There is spirit, passion and inspiration in the hearts and minds of dreamers – dreamers who want to go to places no one has ever been, to see things no one has ever seen and to do things others couldn’t do. That’s what the romance is all about.”
Next stop – Mars?
Asked about the difficulty of going beyond the Moon to Mars, Cernan said, “It would be technologically, philosophically and psychologically a much greater challenge. But look back at when President Kennedy announced that we were going to the Moon – truly, that was an impossible task! He was asking us to do something that couldn’t be done. If you take that idea and move it forward to today, the challenge is probably not much different.”
“The first picture of Earthrise changed the way humans thought about themselves.”
Eugene Cernan is excited about what the first Earthlings to step onto Martian soil would encounter: “When Apollo 8 went to the Moon and took that first picture of Earthrise – the earth rising over the horizon – it changed the way humans thought about themselves. Now imagine what it would be like to send a picture back to Earth from Mars of a star . . . and the star would be us here on Earth – that’s mind-boggling!”
Leaving a mark on history
During 20 years as a naval aviator, including 13 years with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Captain Eugene A. Cernan left his mark on history with three historic missions in space: as the pilot of Gemini IX, he became only the second American to walk in space; as the lunar module pilot of Apollo X, he orbited the Moon; and as the commander of Apollo XVII, he was the last human being to leave a footprint on the lunar surface.
Eugene Cernan’s Speedmaster
Cernan’s relationship with the OMEGA Speedmaster has been a long one, covering more than forty years. “The Speedmaster is the only thing we took the Moon that had no modification whatsoever – it was right off the shelf. What’s interesting about my first one is that it’s beat up, it’s never been cleaned, it’s never been repaired and to this day I can take that watch and wind it and it keeps time as well as the day I got it. And I’ve walked in space with it for two and a half hours and worn it on the Moon for over three days.”
