Gene Cernan Quotes
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It's our destiny to explore. It's our destiny to be a space-faring nation.
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Neil Armstrong was probably one of the most human guys I've ever known in my life.
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Once I finally stepped on the moon, no matter what was to come of the next three days - or the rest of my life - nobody could take those steps from me. People ask how long will they be there, and I say forever, however long forever is, like my daughter’s initials that I scribbled in the sand [TDC for Tracy Dawn Cernan].
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To become an astronaut, someone has to have a dream of his own to do something that he or she has always wanted to do, then commit himself to making that dream come true.
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If you begin to think you're something you're not, you're looking in the wrong mirror.
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As I step off at the surface at Taurus-Littrow, I'd like to dedicate the first step of Apollo 17 to all those who made it possible.
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After Apollo 17, America stopped looking towards the next horizon. The United States had become a space-faring nation, but threw it away. We have sacrificed space exploration for space exploitation, which is interesting but scarcely visionary.
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Yes, I am the last man to have walked on the moon, and that's a very dubious and disappointing honor. It's been far too long.
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Am I willing to go to Mars? Yes, but I'm not willing to spend nine months getting there, then wait 18 more months until the planets align to come home.
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We don't have the capability today to put a human being in space of any kind, shape or form, which is absolutely, totally unacceptable when we got the greatest flying machine in the world sitting down at Kennedy in a garage there with nothing to do.
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If the guidance failed or started to stray or went somewhere we didn't like or the ground didn't like, I could flip a switch, and I could control seven, over seven and a half million pounds of thrust with this handle and fly the thing to the Moon myself.
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Perhaps the two greatest moments of my life were standing on the moon and being outside of the room when my granddaughter was born! We tend not to remember the worst.
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We leave as we came, and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind.
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Some of the most exciting space education in the country is not coming out of Washington or New York or California or even Texas. It's coming from a place in Kansas called the Cosmosphere.
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I've been asked about UFOs and I've said publicly I thought they were somebody else, some other civilization.
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We went into darkness after being in daylight the whole time on the way to the Moon. And then we went into darkness. And we're in the shadow... of the Moon.
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OK, let's get this mother out of here.
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Prepare for the unknown, unexpected and inconceivable . . . after 50 years of flying I'm still learning every time I fly.
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As I take man's last step from the surface, back home for some time to come...I'd like to just (say) what I believe history will record. That America's challenge of today has forged man's destiny of tomorrow. As we leave the Moon at Taurus- Littrow, we leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind. "Godspeed the crew of Apollo 17."
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I do believe there is life in outer space. Mathematically, there has to be, and if you believe as I do that there is a creator of the universe, then how can we be so arrogant to believe he created life here and nowhere else?
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I hold the world speed record downhill, in a Rover. I think it was 17 kilometers per hour, downhill.
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Nobody can take those footsteps I made on the surface of the moon away from me.
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Another hundred years may pass before we understand the true significance of Apollo. Lunar exploration was not the equivalent of an American pyramid, some idle monument to technology, but more of a Rosetta stone, a key to unlocking dreams as yet undreamed.
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I'm quite disappointed that I'm still the last man on the moon.
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The mass gross absence of sound in space is more than just silence.
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Chemical propulsion is obsolete to go anywhere other than the moon. Three days - that's acceptable. But for Mars, we need propulsion technologies to get us there in, say, 60 days - then spend whatever length of time we want to spend and return when we want to come home.
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Today, we are on a path of decay. We are seeing the book close on five decades of accomplishment as the leader in human space exploration.
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I know the stars are my home. I learned about them, needed them for survival in terms of navigation. I know where I am when I look up at the sky. I know where I am when I look up at the Moon; it's not just some abstract romantic idea, it's something very real to me. See, I've expanded my home.
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I was a child of World War Two . I saw films of pilots taking off from aircraft carriers and decided that was the only thing I wanted to do. And it had to be flying from sea carriers. Airfields were not enough.
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Get the shuttle out of the garage. It's in its prime of its life. How could we just put it away?
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