Harrison Schmidt and Eugene Cernan were the last two people to ever walk on the lunar surface, the eleventh and twelfth people ever to do so, spending twenty-two hours and three minutes and fifty-seven seconds outside their lunar lander exploring the moon's surface. Cernan, as mission commander, was the last man to return to the lunar lander, but...
[b]efore Cernan left the moon on the Apollo 17 mission he remembered his daughter in a special way. “I drove the Rover about a mile away from the LM and parked it carefully so the television camera could photograph our takeoff the next day. As I dismounted, I took a moment to kneel and with a single finger, scratched [my daughter] Tracy’s initials, ‘TDC,’ in the lunar dust, knowing those three letters would remain there undisturbed for more years than anyone could imagine.” (source)Since Cernan and Schmidt left the moon, we have never returned. In three and a half years of missions, we landed Americans on the moon six times before the Apollo program was ended for budgetary concerns, and we have never...ever...not once...left Earth's gravitational pull.
We took the greatest accomplishment that we as a species had ever managed - delivering to another celestial body our best and brightest before returning them safely to Earth - and stopped doing it because it was pricey.
We saw the glory of the universe, took the first step to spreading ourselves beyond where we were born, and we pulled back, we closed the door and seem to be at least politically content to live in our box.
This is a tragedy.
Eugene Cernana's gesture is a beautiful tribute.
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