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Out of all the billions of people who accept lived on Earth, only 12 of them walked on the moon. Yesterday, on Martin Luther King 24-hour interval, the last man to set foot on the moon passed away. Apollo astronaut Eugene Cernan was 82 at the time of his death, but in 1972 at the age of 38 he had the dandy and sorrowful honor of being the final man to set pes on the moon.

Cernan began his career as a Naval Aviator flying FJ-4 Fury and A-4 Skyhawk jets. In a few year's he'd be flying something with a petty more than ability. His time at NASA started with the Gemini programme, the precursor to Apollo. Gemini was geared toward working out how humans could survive in infinite. Cernan was originally a backup airplane pilot for Gemini 9, simply the master coiffure was tragically lost in a airplane crash iv months before launch. That left Cernan as the pilot and Thomas Stafford as the command pilot on Gemini 9A. That missions successfully completed 47 orbits of the Earth and included a 2-hr spacewalk.

In add-on to being the last man to walk on the moon, Cernan has the stardom of being i of only three people to travel to the moon twice. His outset Apollo mission was Apollo 10, which you lot 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 dress rehearsal for the actual moon landing that was to follow. The craft orbited the moon and Cernan took the LM down to the moon as if it was going to land, simply just to an distance of viii.4 nautical miles. That's where the powered descent to the surface would accept place, but Apollo 10 was just there to test the organization, not state. In fact, NASA didn't completely fuel the LM in order to discourage the coiffure from deciding to merely gear up down on the surface and stick their tongues out at Mission Control. Technically, they could accept landed, but they wouldn't have been able to lift off again.

Cernan

Cernan finally got to set foot on the moon every bit commander of Apollo 17 (seen above subsequently 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 coiffure had known since 1970 that Apollo 17 was slated to be the final manned mission to the moon, but that was only Apollo. Perhaps Eugene Cernan didn't realize that no i would be back to the moon for the remainder of his life when he stepped off the lunar surface that day, but here we are decades later and confined to low-World orbit.

There are currently simply 6 living humans who have walked on the moon: Fizz 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.