Product Description
Product Description
The last man to set foot on the moon chronicles his participation in the Apollo program, including his journey into space as commander of Apollo 17.
From the Author
The development of this book, The Last Man on the Moon
Greetings, Reader: On a bright Florida morning in 1969, I watched in wonder as a huge, magnificent Saturn rocket took off Destination: Moon. That was Apollo 10, doing a dress rehearsal for the Apollo 11 landing, and the lunar module pilot aboard that spacecraft was a crew-cut astronaut named Gene Cernan. Although I was one of the reporters covering the launch, I had never met the guy. But almost 30 years later, we have formed a firm friendship, because Gene let me write this book about his incredible life. Neither of us wanted it to be just another astronaut memoir, so we decided from the start to minimize technology and emphasize people. As we worked, I realized it had taken 30 years before one of those pioneer astronauts would break the code of silence and really talk about the sacrifice, the pain, the obsession and the problems of earning a walk on the Moon. Genes single rule was that he wanted to put the reader on top of the rocket and on the Moon, right along with him. So if you are looking for a tech manual about how such machines fly, this is not the book for you. We have some that, of course, because we couldnt tell the story without it, but we kept it to a minimum. I guarantee that you will come to the last page very tired and weary and delighted to have survived so many close calls and to have lived on the Moon for three days. He wrote this with his poets heart, not with his engineers brain, and result is different than any space book Ive ever read
and Ive read them all. Youll meet the original astros, the wives and children who carried such a lonesome load while their men were gone, thrill at the race with the Soviet Union in the troubled Cold War days, laugh in triumph and grieve in defeat with the people in the early, dangerous days of space exploration as somehow this nation accomplished the impossible, and sent a dozen men to walk on the Moon. And youll get a great trivia question answered. Everyone knows what Neil Armstrongs FIRST words on the Moon were, but what were the LAST words said there by an astronaut, Capt. Gene Cernan, commander of Apollo 17? So, strap on a Saturn V, enjoy the ride and let us hear from you. Don Davis