The Last Moonwalker


By Guy Harrison

The confident and capable astronaut had become the third human to walk in space and was now well on his way to setting a new EVA record of 2 hours and nine minutes. But as sweat streaked down his face and fog crept across his visor, he began to think about little more than survival. His heart raced and it became uncertain if he would be able to make it back inside the small Gemini spacecraft. These were the early days of space exploration and Gene Cernan was discovering firsthand just how much remained to be learned.

Cernan escaped disaster that day to fly all the way to the Moon on Apollo 10 in May of 1969. He and mission commander Thomas Stafford flew the lunar module within ten miles of the Moon to pave the way for the first landing that would take place two months later.

Apollo 17 was the crowning glory of Cernan's remarkable career. He served as mission commander, flying with Ron Evans and Harrison Schmitt. On December 11, 1972 Cernan and Schmitt landed on the Moon. They spent 73 hours in a deep valley called Taurus-Littrow, putting in hard days exploring and quiet nights sleeping inside the lunar module.

Cernan certainly is proud of his time spent on the lunar surface. However, he finds the title of "last man on the Moon", to be a dubious honor. He happily would relinquish it, he says, just to see humans heading back to that place he once called home for three unforgettable days.


Guy Harrison: To be the last man on the Moon is unique and special, but would you prefer to have seen many more people follow behind you?
Gene Cernan: I have been the last man on the Moon for far too long. It's been 30 years. When I came back on Apollo 17 the press kept asking me how it felt to be the tail of the dog, the last one over the fence. I told them that Apollo 17 is not the end; it is the beginning. I said that not only are we going to go back to the Moon, but we will be on our way to Mars by the turn of the century. I don't regret what I said. My glass is not half empty, it's half full. We are going to do that, but were not going to do it as quickly as I had hoped we would.

To be called the "last man on the Moon" is an honor. It's a dubious honor, but it is an honor. I didn't plan to be the last man on the Moon. I lived on the Moon for the three days and I made those last steps on the Moon. But I would much rather see us exploring space avidly today, rather than what we are doing up there now.

Frankly, nobody knows or nobody cares [about NASA's efforts in recent years]. It doesn't turn anybody on. Once the shuttle is gone no one knows what is happening.
We need to get back into the exploration mode. We need to get humans geared up to go back to the Moon and to Mars. It will happen. I might not see it but you will see it.

Describe that rough Gemini 9 EVA [June, 1966].
We were venturing into a domain that we didn't know much about. Leonev, the Russian [first human to walk in space; March 18, 1965], was out there for 12 minutes. I know him very well, and he will admit today that he spent the first three minutes getting out and the last nine fighting for his survival just to get back in [the spacecraft]. It wasn't much of a spacewalk really. Ed White [Gemini 4, second human to walk in space; June 3, 1965] was out there for 20 minutes, had this little gun [hand-held propulsion unit] and tooted around. Everything went great. It was just getting out there and seeing what it was like. Ed did have some problems getting back into the spacecraft but we didn't pay much attention to it because we knew it was a tight fit.

The next spacewalk was going to be done by Dave Scott on Gemini XIII. But that was scrubbed when they had a thruster problem and they came back in and never did the spacewalk. So all of the sudden we went from 20 minutes with Ed White to a two-and-a-half hour planned walk with me actually detaching from the umbilical and putting on a backpack [AMU, or Astronaut Maneuvering Unit]. It was ambitious. We ignored the fundamental problems that we might encounter, all of us, myself and everybody involved. It wasn't anticipated to be dangerous. It was anticipated to be a challenge. Nobody ever thought of the problems we would run into in terms of stabilization, holding position. I had a tremendously difficult time just assembling this backpack, the AMU [stored at the rear of the Gemini capsule]. All I had was something like a bicycle handlebar to hold onto and I had a bar to stand on. But nobody stands on anything in zero gravity. What was eventually developed was "golden slippers" [footholds on the spacecraft] that guys can put their feet in. And if you can anchor your feet in zero gravity then you can pick up an 18-wheeler truck with your hands.

It was difficult and challenging up to the point when I overpowered my cooling system and became all fogged up [helmet visor]. My heart rate was high. I was getting tired. I came closer than I was willing to admit at the time to a serious situation. But at this point we realized that I was in danger. We realized that we were in a position that there might not have been a way out of. I was very disappointed that I couldn't continue. In retrospect it was probably one of the best decisions we ever made. We knew that getting back into the spacecraft was going to be a problem, a problem that was multiplied because I was so tired and still fogged up. It was also hard because of my size and the bulkiness of the spacesuit. I had to wear a steel coverall in my pants. Yeah, you add up all of this and we flirted with danger. Had I put the pack on I think I could have flown it. That part of it would have been successful but we just did not have adequate plans.

Just think, the backpack I was going to wear was supposed to fire hot hydrogen peroxide exhaust so I had to wear steel pants. That is totally inconceivable today. They use cold nitrogen to move around with today. I was actually going to fire a hot rocket down my butt on both sides, and in order to protect myself I was going to wear steel pants. Now how crazy is that?

It wasn't until years later that I realized how dangerous that mission was. I got so involved with the next flight that I just never thought about what I had really gone through. Only when I wrote my book [Last Man on the Moon, 1999, St. Martin's Press] and went over every bit of detail, including the medical records and transcripts, did I realize that the people on the ground were very, very concerned.

What was it like to fly the Lunar Module? How did it handle?
Well, it was an ugly little thing, wasn't it? People will look at that thing a hundred years from now and they won't be able to understand what we were thinking. It was like the Beverly Hillbillies. We strapped everything we could to the sides of it, everything but the piano.

We had the rover strapped to the side, a nuclear power system, all of our equipment strapped on it. It was shrouded aerodynamically during launch on the Saturn V and once we were out of the atmosphere aerodynamics didn't matter. There's no air all the way to the Moon so we could design it to be functional and not worry about aerodynamic characteristics.

There were no seats. We had to stand up and we didn't have very big windows because weight was such an important consideration. The only time it got your attention is when you repressurized it and took off your helmet and gloves. Then you think about how frail the thing is. For example, the hatch for the command module looks like it was built for a tank, but the Lunar Module hatch looks like a little oil cap. It's just a thin thing that bolts down and there is nothing between you and the universe except this little sheet of aluminum titanium. But it performed beautifully.

The whole 14-plus minutes landing [Apollo 17] is a story of its own. It was a magnificent flying machine. It responded well and flew well. When we went down we weighed something like 40,000 pounds. When we lifted off the surface of the Moon we were something like 10,000 pounds in one-sixth gravity. It was just a like a little fighter airplane. If there had been an aircraft carrier somewhere around I think it could have made a great landing on it.

How did your experience as a fighter pilot translate to space flight?
Going to the Moon was not a natural extension of flying. Some people say it is but for me it wasn't. It was a whole different world, both technologically and spiritually. It was something new and different. I made use of my background and all that I had learned, but it was a real challenge. I flew to another place in the universe. Just to say that sounds like I've been smoking something. But it happened. I was there. The Moon was my Camelot for three days of my life.

You and Harrison Schmitt [the geologist turned astronaut that landed with Cernan] accomplished some serious science while on the Moon. How rewarding was that for you?
Once we got there we had something to do. Preparing to be a scientist, a lunar geologist was in itself challenging and quite frankly was very interesting. We went were no man had ever been before. Every step we took on that part of the Moon was the first by a human. We saw things that no human being had ever seen before.
The science was exciting and a big a part of the mission. Going and coming, and the landing were certainly the highpoints for me, but the science was very meaningful. This was not just some place we could go back to easily so we had to work hard and do a lot of things in the limited time we had.

Did you become mentally comfortable over the three days that you spent on the surface of the Moon? Or were you constantly aware of how dangerous it was? Did you have any nagging anxiety about the ascent stage failing? [the ascent stage is the portion of the Lunar Module that carried astronauts up to rendezvous with the command module for the journey home]

I was very comfortable. If I was worried about being stranded or whatever, then I shouldn't have gone in the first place. While I was on the Moon I never worried about that moment when we had to fire the engine and get off. I was extremely comfortable, still all the time realizing that we were vulnerable to a whole host of problems. I was prepared. I figured I could handle it. I didn't sit there with my finger on the trigger all the time. We had a job to do. I was comfortable with the environment even though it was a very hostile environment.

Things did get a little exciting when it came time to lift off, because if that engine had failed to fire, quite frankly I don't know what I would have done. Thank God I don't have to answer that question.

How physically demanding was the work you did on the Moon?
It was extremely physically demanding. Our heart rates ran 140, 150, 160 beats per minute the majority of the time we were there, other than when we were riding in the [lunar] rover.
Moving around on the Moon in one-sixth gravity was a breeze once you learned how to do it. But drilling core samples was tough. We ran a pretty healthy workload the whole time we were there.

Tell me about the initials that you scratched on the Moon.
When it was time to leave, I parked the rover about a mile behind the lunar module so the television camera [remotely operated by Mission Control on Earth] could view our liftoff. When I got out I just had an inspiration to do it and wrote "TDC", Tracy Dawn Cernan [daughter]. I guess it will be there forever, however long forever is.

What thoughts went through your mind as you walked back to the Lunar Module for the final time?
It was a fairly long walk. I thought, "pinch yourself one more time and make sure this is real. You're going to be out of here soon so appreciate it." I knew that something special, a once in a lifetime thing was about to end. It became a little nostalgic for me.

I wanted it all to be meaningful. I wanted the entire program and Apollo 17 that ended the program to be successful and meaningful. I said some words: "May America's challenge of today be man's destiny of tomorrow."

I felt very strongly that we must press on, we must continue. That's why it's very frustrating for me to be sitting her today with the label of "last man to walk on the Moon".

Where will the Apollo program rank in history a thousand years from now?
Records are made to be broken and achievements are meant to be surpassed with greater achievements, but I think that Apollo is going to rank very high.

I do think that people 50 or 100 years from now will look back and wonder what the hell was going through our minds because we had the ability to leave the Earth and go to the Moon but we just quit. A thousand years from now, however, I think the time frame will be so compressed that it won't even notice it. A thousand years from now we will be living on Mars. We will be coming back to Earth to visit the place where our great-great-great-grandparents grew up. Or, we will visit the place where humans first left the Earth to go to the Moon. Mars and the Earth will be sister planets in the same way that Europe and North America were to my grandparents. The Old Country and the New World. It will be the Old World and the New World.

How did standing so far away from the Earth's problems effect you?
I just wish I could take every human being in the world and stand them beside me on the Moon for about five minutes. You get the idea that the world might be a little different if people could just see it from the Moon, not just see it but feel it too.

You feel somewhat helpless because you know you can't change things. For me it reinforced my feelings that the world is too beautiful to have happened by accident. There must be something or somebody bigger than us who put it all together. When I stood on the Moon, I stood at a point in space and time where I witnessed science meeting its match. Science could no longer explain what I was witnessing at that point in time.

It tells you that we are on one big sailing ship moving through the universe. If you have a belief in God, no matter what name you call him, you have to believe that he has given us an opportunity to do what we want with our lives and our world. We are a piece of his creation moving through the universe and where we end up, or if we self-destruct, is up to us.
When you look back at the Earth, it is so overwhelming, so powerful and beautiful. You see no borders, no language differences, no color differences. You don't see terrorism. Like I said, I just wish I could take every human being up there and tell them to take a look.

This interview was originally published in the Caymanian Compass on 9 August 2002.

'I was the first man in space'

By Guy Harrison

In August of 1960, a balloon carried US Air Force test pilot Joe Kittinger to an altitude of 102,800 feet, nearly 20 miles above the Earth. He was at the place where the atmosphere ends and space begins, a hostile territory that makes eyeballs explode and blood boil. Instant death waited just beyond the protection of Kittinger's pressure suit and helmet. But the climb was only half of the Excelsior III mission.

At 7:10am Kittinger took one last glance at the world below and then stepped out of the gondola. The drop lasted 13 minutes and his body broke the sound barrier on the way down. More than 40 years later it is still the greatest jump in aviation history.

Despite the daredevil nature of the feat, Kittinger was no stuntman looking for attention. He was a test pilot, committed to learning new things and finding ways to make aviation and the exploration of space safer. The series of high-altitude balloon projects in the 1950s and 1960s that Kittinger was part of contributed to NASA's race to the Moon and were key to the development of safe ejection systems for high-performance aircraft. The public has largely forgotten these men and their accomplishments, but that may change soon. The Pre-Astronauts, an excellent book by Craig Ryan, details the balloon voyages to the edge of space and it is to be the basis of an upcoming movie. Kittinger says he has been assured that the movie will be loyal to the facts.

The history books may agree that Yuri Gagarin was the first human in space, Joe Kittinger, however, does not. "I was the first man in space," he says. He defines space as the point where humans die rapidly without artificial protection. So when Gagarin took his rocket ride in 1961, Kittinger points out that he had already taken his own bold step out into space a year earlier. Craig Ryan, author of The Pre-Astronauts, agrees.

"We can think of his bailout at 103,000 feet as the first space walk," Ryan says. "The most impressive thing of all may be that he has survived to tell the tales of his remarkable accomplishments. Survival doesn't just happen, it comes as the result of meticulous planning and preparation. Joe did everything the right way."

After his work with research balloons, Kittinger returned to his fighter pilot roots and volunteered for three combat tours during the Vietnam War. In 1972 he shot down a Mig-21 and was later shot down himself. He was captured and held for 11 months at the infamous "Hanoi Hilton" where the North Vietnamese tortured him.

Although Kittinger was deeply disappointed that high altitude balloons were never fully utilized as platforms for astronomical research, his passion for flying never dimmed. Over the last couple of decades he has enjoyed the life of a biplane barnstormer and won prestigious hot-air balloon races. In 1984 he became the first to make a solo balloon flight across the Atlantic Ocean.
While his claim to be the first in space may be debatable, there can be no argument that Colonel Joseph Kittinger is one of the greatest aviators of all time.


Guy Harrison: When you were a child did you imagine that you would accomplish so much in aviation?
Col. Joe Kittinger: Well, no. My dream was to be a fighter pilot. But I never dreamed I would be able to make the contributions that I have.

How close to death were you on Excelsior I? And how did you talk yourself into going back and doing more missions?
Excelsior I was a dangerous freefall. I was unconscious and the only reason I lived is because one of my team members figured out all the worst things that could happen and prepared the equipment for it. And the worst that could happen did happen. Of the three jumps that was the closest I came to not making it. But I knew we needed the data. I knew that we needed to continue with the project. I had no reservations about continuing. I had confidence in the equipment and in my team.

Before the ManHigh, Excelsior and Strato-Lab projects, how much was known about keeping a human alive in space?
Not much. You may think you know about something but until you actually do it you just don't know. There were some unknowns but we thought we had them pretty well figured out. What you worry about are the things you don't know anything about, the surprises.

As it turned out, we had figured things would work out just about the way they did. Our preparations for the tests were in fact very valid.

The point where space begins seems to be a subjective judgement. Do you feel that you were the first person in space and Yuri Gagarin was second?
I was the first man in space. Space starts at 62,000 feet because that is where you cannot live without a pressure suit. If you were exposed at 65,000 feet you would die very quickly, for example. So for man, space begins at 62,000 feet because that is the point at which you have to have a pressure suit on in order to live.

What is the view like 20 miles up?
It's a heck of a perch. I could see for 400 miles. But I was there as an experimental test pilot to gather data. I wasn't there to look out over the Earth as a beautiful object. I had to get the job done and get data in the space environment.

How bad was your right hand during the Excelsior III mission? Why didn't you abort when it was obvious that you had a serious problem?
It happened [pressure suit leak] at about 40,000 on the way up. I felt that I could sustain the pain and problems of not having a functioning right hand. I also felt that had I aborted they would have cancelled the program. I thought it was worth the risks so I made a conscious decision not to tell anybody about it.

About two hours after I landed on the ground I regained full use of my hand.

Is it true that you broke the sound barrier with your body?
Yes. At 90,000 feet I went 714 miles per hour.

Are you still the fastest human ever without an engine?
People have ejected from aircraft at faster speeds than that. But we did not do any of this to set records. It was all to gather data and information for the space program. Records were a by-product of why we were there. Although I jumped from over 100,000 feet and nobody else has done it in 41 years, we didn’t do it for that.

Describe the experience of freefalling from 20 miles up [Excelsior III mission].
It was the third jump I made from a balloon but this one was really up in space. I was in five millimeters of pressure which is the same pressure that there is on Mars. I was in almost a complete vacuum. Even though I had jumped twice before from balloons at very high altitudes, this jump turned out to be very interesting. When I jumped I felt like I was just suspended in space and nothing was happening. Then I turned over on my back and I saw the balloon and gondola just rocketing into space. I couldn't believe how fast it was flying upward. Then, of course, I realized that it was me going down at a tremendous rate while the balloon was staying at the same altitude.

Were you able to enjoy the experience of that jump despite the intensity of it?
No. I was there for business, there as a test pilot. I had a lot of things to worry about. How my parachute was working, my pressure suit.

Why did you choose flying combat missions during the Vietnam War over the space program?
Well, I was really disappointed. I had worked for five years on a program to take an astronomer into space. We were on the edge of making fantastic discoveries using a manned balloon observatory. But they cancelled the program and I was a fighter pilot so I opted to go to Vietnam.

How productive could balloons be for astronomical work? Could they compete with the Hubble Telescope?
Yes, and for one-hundredth of the cost. Tremendous gains could have been derived from balloon observatories that were never attained. The problem was that we didn't have a lobby. NASA had all aircraft industry making big bucks. What I was doing cost the taxpayers nothing, but there was no lobbying for it. There were no admirals and generals pushing for it because they wouldn't get anything out of it. The only people that would have benefited would have been the research community.

The Hubble is a great thing but there were many things that could have been achieved much cheaper and quicker with a balloon-borne observatory.

The balloon platform is stable enough?
Yes. Part of the project was working with MIT. They designed stabilization and star tracking equipment just for use on a balloon observatory.

You may not want to hear this question, but can you shed some light on the belief many have about little green men falling from the skies over New Mexico?
It never happened. There was a very top secret Army project that was designed to detect when the Russians detonated a nuclear weapon. They sent a balloon aloft with a very long antenna array, almost 500 feet long. It had very exotic looking equipment on it. The balloon landed on a ranch near Roswell. The so-called alien space ship was that balloon.

It's turned into a cottage industry and it put Roswell on the map. A lot of people want to believe it was aliens and they want to believe there was a big cover up. But I'll tell you, it never happened.

Do you think the crash dummies you were dropping from high altitude balloons contributed to this myth?
Absolutely they did. These dummies that we dropped from balloons were dressed in pressure suits so they looked unusual. One time we dropped one and it fell way up in the mountains. These dummies weighed more than 250 pounds, so how do you carry one out of the mountains? We put it on a stretcher and carried it to the back of an ambulance to take away. Now if somebody is back in the weeds watching this they are going to say, "Wow, look at that alien they have there." We think that a lot of the alien sightings were actually us doing our work with the test dummies.
There is an Air Force report that covers it all. It's called "The Roswell Incident: Case Closed". Anyone that has any doubts about what happened at Roswell should read it. When you get to the end of it you won't have any doubts. Anyone that is interested in the truth and the real facts should read that report.

What stands out in your memory most, jumping out at 100,000 feet or air combat in Vietnam?
The jump. There was a lot of tension associated with that, where as when you are fighting with an aircraft everything happens very, very fast.

Are you bitter about your experiences at the "Hanoi Hilton"? [Kittinger was tortured by the North Vietnamese].
Oh no. That's in the past. A lot of us are still upset about Jane Fonda though. She was a traitor and she should have been brought to trial. A lot of us still feel badly about that.

[Actress Jane Fonda was an anti-war protester during the Vietnam conflict. She enraged many Americans when she posed for photos atop a North Vietnamese antiaircraft missile launcher.]

How much did the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo programs borrow from the high altitude balloon efforts you were involved with?
We feel that our programs helped NASA and helped speed up the space program and make it safer. We didn't make a huge contribution to them, but we were one of many that helped by making smaller contributions.

How has the US Air Force utilized your discoveries about high-altitude bailouts?
The escape systems that are used today by the Air Force are derived from the drag formulas that we came up with back in the 1950s and 1960s.

It must be rewarding to have had such a direct impact on something that has saved the lives of many pilots over the years.
Yes, it is. The funny thing is, the Russians use the same exact system we designed too.

How special was your transatlantic balloon flight [In 1984 Kittinger became the first human to fly a balloon solo across the Atlantic]?
The work that I did on ManHigh, Excelsior and StarGazer was all for scientific purposes. The reason for flying the Atlantic solo in a balloon was adventure. It had never been done before. It had nothing to do with gathering data, it was just a lot of fun, a real adventure.

You have flown a lot of planes [88 planes, 16,000 hours] in your lifetime. If you could only choose one to take up, what would it be?
I've flown a lot of them. If I had to choose one, it would be the P-51 Mustang [World War II fighter plane]. It was the most exciting plane that there was, and I say that after flying all the jets there were. The P-51 was just pure excitement.

This was published in the Caymanian Compass on 26 October 2001