One bright moonlit night in Florida, as we headed back to the ABC News workspace at the Kennedy Space Canter, astronaut Gene Cernan turned to me and pointed up to the big yellow ball in the sky.
"You see that spot just by the 'eye?'" he asked me, referring to the unmistakable face of the Man in the Moon. "You see that? That's where I landed. That's the Valley of Taurus-Littrow."
The grin on his own face was boundless; the pride, palpable. The last human to leave his footprints on the lunar surface knew he'd had the experience of a lifetime.
How lucky we were as a nation, and as a space-going species, to have Gene Cernan, who died Monday at the age of 82, as one of us. His enthusiasm for space travel and his ability to convey its wonders were marvels. And he did it with the precision of an engineer and the artistry of a poet.
In time, through a series of circumstances, I became ABC's lead space anchor and correspondent, and always sitting beside me on the booth was the indefatigable astronaut. Cernan's unabashed cheerleading for the success of the shuttle ("Go, baby, go!" he memorably said into his microphone as the Columbia first lifted off) was a perfectly acceptable contrast to our own journalistic neutrality. And made for some warm moments of humanity on the air.
In 1983, during the 2 a.m. launch of STS-8 -– NASA's first attempt to send up a shuttle without benefit of daylight -– Cernan turned to me after liftoff and said, fairly bubbling, "Do you believe me now, Lynn?" He was talking about his own last launch on Apollo 17, more than a decade earlier, a nighttime display that he'd witnessed from inside of the spacecraft, and about which he was endlessly exuberant. I told him I got it.
I learned a lot from Cernan, some of it not exactly technical.
He told me about the old "Right Stuff" days, when the swaggering guys in the silver suits would drive into the Space Center just flashing a pack of cigarettes, palmed in their hands, rather than credentials. And he taught me that some of that macho tradition persisted.
During one launch, as I contemplated the potentially dodgy fate of the humans on board the world's most complicated flying machine, I uttered the word, "fear."
Cernan, with only a bit of humor in his voice, corrected me, saying, "Astronauts are never frightened, Lynn. A little apprehensive at times, but never frightened."
