THE man in the dark blue suit extends his hand and grabs mine in a rock-solid, vise-like grip, conditioned from years of yanking on the hydraulically-boosted stick of a McDonnell A-4 Skyhawk light attack aircraft, flying off of the heaving deck of aircraft carriers.
James May said once, you should never meet your childhood heroes. Because, they might turn out to be a colossal disappointment. But if you must, there are a couple of things that you must never do, like start the conversation with “I’m your biggest fan!”
I shake this man’s hand, mutter a quiet and respectful “Cap’n…” and grab a seat. Sitting in front of me was one of the only 12 human beings to have ever walked on another heavenly body, the last man to walk on the moon and possibly the only human being to have ever sworn a blue streak like a sailor, in lunar orbit.
It was 1994, the 25th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Captain Eugene Andrew Cernan, United States Navy, was the guest of honour at an exhibition in Singapore to commemorate the event. He may not have been as famous in these parts as Neil Armstrong or Buzz Aldrin, but for a kid who grew up in the 70s, at the tail end and, in the shadow of Project Apollo, Cernan, a veteran of three spaceflights, was a legend.
At 60, his voice was raspy, tired and weary from the countless interviews he had given since arriving in Singapore. That afternoon, his eyes were bloodshot, his face craggy and weather-beaten. The public relations types told me that he had decided to cut short my interview, from 45 minutes to 20.
I dove right in and asked about his near-fatal spacewalk on Gemini 9 in 1966 and how the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) management had told his mission commander Tom Stafford that if Cernan had died, he would have to somehow bring him back into the two-man Gemini spacecraft because “we can’t afford to have a dead astronaut floating around in space”.
“We were suiting up and they came in, kicked me and the suit techs (technicians) out and told Stafford that. This was about two hours before we launched. They didn’t tell me. After we were plugged into the spacecraft, I asked Tom what it was all about.
“He said ‘Geno, they said they hope we have a really good flight today’.”
That flight wasn’t Cernan’s only close call with death while flying in space. In May, 1969, Cernan flew as Lunar Module (LEM) pilot on Apollo 10, alongside his old Gemini 9 commander, Stafford, and Command Module (CSM) pilot John Young.
Apollo 10 was the final dress rehearsal for the moon landing, scheduled for July that year.
After undocking with the CSM Charlie Brown in lunar orbit, Stafford and Cernan took the LEM Snoopy “down among the weeds”, hot-dogging and zooming just above the lunar mountains.
Just 50,000ft off of the lunar surface, Stafford and Cernan jettisoned the LEM’s descent stage to simulate a liftoff from the lunar surface and link up with the Command Module. Almost immediately, the LEM began to roll violently because the crew had accidentally duplicated commands into the flight computer, which took the LEM out of abort mode, the correct configuration for this manoeuvre.
The entire mission was broadcast ‘live’ on the TV networks on Earth and the ‘hot mikes’ caught both Cernan and Stafford letting fly a torrent of expletives before regaining control of the LEM.
“Son of a (expletive deleted)! Hitthe AGS!” Cernan yelled for Stafford to flip the switch on the Abort Guidance System. Cernan said he saw the lunar horizon spinning eight times over, indicating eight rolls of the spacecraft under ascent engine power.
“Yeah, we took a lot of heat for that,” said Cernan ruefully.
He is often asked if the crew of Apollo 10 would have attempted a lunar landing.
“Astronauts are all Type-A personalities. Would we have tried to land? You bet your sweet…” he laughed.
“That’s why Nasa took some precautions. The fuel tanks on Snoopy weren’t filled up all the way. Plus, the LEM was too heavy to land safely on the moon.”
When the conversation drifted to Apollo 17, Cernan became almost philosophical. At times, he seemed agitated, upset that humans had not returned to the moon.
“I sat on God’s front porch for three days,” he said of the 75 hours he and Lunar Module pilot Harrison ‘Jack’ Schmitt spent in the valley of Taurus-Littrow, on the southeastern edge of the Sea of Serenity, while Ronald Evans orbited above in the Command Module.
On Dec 7, 1972, at 12.33am EST, the huge, 363ft-tall Saturn V rocket lifted off Pad 39A at Cape Canaveral and thundered skywards, riding an 800ft trail of fire from its five F-1 engines that turned the Florida night into day.
Just before lift-off, Cernan, the commander, told his rookie crew: “I know you’re going to do your jobs. But make sure you do one other thing: enjoy this, have fun. You’re not going to get to do it again.”
He didn’t know back then how right he would be. Forty-five years after he and Schmitt lifted off from the surface of the moon on Dec 14 aboard the LEM Challenger, docked with Evans in the orbiting America, fired the big Service Propulsion System engine for the burn home and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean five days later, Cernan remains the last man on the moon.
While Apollo 17 was a worthy capstone to the whole lunar enterprise that spanned nine years and at its height, employed more than 400,000 Americans, Cernan said mankind dropped the ball. Armstrong died in August 2012, but in the last two years of his life, he, along with Cernan and Apollo 13 commander James Lovell, had become very vocal, calling for the space programme to reorient itself and go back to the moon, and Mars, and beyond.
In doing so, they have ruffled a few feathers at Nasa in ways they dared not when they were young astronauts jockeying for flight assignments.
In a 2012 interview with Time magazine, Cernan said he’s been happy to talk about his missions for the last four decades, partly because he felt a responsibility to do so.
“When the last of us is gone, it will all be told in the third person,” he had said. “It will all be hearsay.”
That afternoon, in 1994, after sitting with me for an interview that lasted well over two hours, Cernan gave me a personal tour of the exhibits, which included a full-sized replica of the LEM and the Lunar Rover (a battery powered car) that he and Schmitt used to venture up to five miles from the relative safety of their LEM.
At the end of it, I shook his hand and muttered a quiet “Thank you, Captain”.
“Geno, please,” he insisted. “Thank you for remembering what we did, what we accomplished.”
As far as childhood heroes go, Cernan did not disappoint. On Monday, Jan 16, Cernan died in Houston, Texas, after a long illness. He was 83.
Farewell, Geno. And, thank you.
This Kajai award winner’s passion is fast jets and flying. When he’s not doing slow-speed, high-alpha passes and four-point rolls, Haris Hussain, NST’s associate editor of production enjoys zooming around in mountain passes and hitting the twisties with the top down.