New York, On that event, Cernan boarded the spacecraft after Schmitt and is officially recognized as the last man on the moon. The Vietnam War raged on, there were riots on American streets, and Congress couldn’t justify spending even more on a space program that had already cost $30 billion. Answer Save. All crewed lunar landings took place between July 1969 and December 1972 as part of the United States Apollo program. It had a great time. Suddenly I’m watching ‘General Hospital.’ That’s the way it was through Apollo 17, and yet each of these missions did something increasingly daring and fascinating.”Among the highlights of the later missions was the debut of the “moon buggy,” the first lunar rover. When was the last time we went to space? "I would want to go back to Shorty Crater and spend more time really trying to define the geological context of the orange soil that we found and sampled," the moonwalker told collectSPACE.com in an recent interview. On December 7, 1972, NASA launched Apollo 17. He completed his flying training in Miramar, California before completing his master’s degree in Aeronautical Engineering in 1963.In October 1963 NASA selected Cernan as part of the Astronauts to participate in the Apollo and Gemini programs. Eugene Cernan was the last man to walk on the moon on December 14th, 1972.
As a young man, he trained as a Boy Scout before graduating from high school in 1952. Cernan was offered the opportunity to walk on the lunar surface aboard the Apollo 16 but turned it down.Cernan chose to lead his crew aboard the Apollo 17 although NASA could not guarantee that the next moon landing was on course. But by Apollo 14, less than two years after 600 million people watched the first moon landing, the prevailing attitude was, “The moon? © He was initially part of the backup crew for the Gemini program until the primary crew all died in a crash in February 1966. Alan Shepard was the oldest person to walk on the Moon, at age 47 years and 80 days. Legendary Mission Control pioneer Christopher Kraft was one of them. The last time a person visited the moon was in December 1972, during NASA's Apollo 17 mission. "But when Cernan clambered over to take a look, he, saw the orange soil, too. The Apollo astronauts brought home hundreds of pounds of moon rock, drilled core samples, measured seismic activity (“moonquakes”), collected atmospheric data of the near-vacuum lunar environment, and measured the precise distance from the Earth to the moon. NASA had built hardware and had plans for increasingly ambitious missions all the way up to Apollo 20, and there was talk of manned flyby missions to Mars and even Venus. But the political winds shifted as quickly as public interest faded. Later examination of samples of that soil taken back to Earth showed that the rocks were After one more day racing the clock to do all the science they could, the lunar crew packed their gear and prepared to climb into Challenger for the last time. Their orbit around the moon paved the way for the landing of the Apollo 11 two months later. It had a workshop, an observatory and carried out hundreds of experiments. “And they did it,” says Pyle. He has Twice a week we compile our most fascinating features and deliver them straight to you.Among seven Apollo moon landing missions, only one did not land men on the moon.© 2020 A&E Television Networks, LLC.