THE SUBSTITUTE

Cernan’s grandparents emigrated to America shortly before the outbreak of the First World War; on his mother’s side, they were Czechs from a Bohemian town south of Prague, while on his father’s side were Slovak peasantry from a place close to the Polish border. Their children, Rose Cihlar and Andrew Cernan, would produce the child who would someday gaze down on Earth through the faceplate of a space suit, would see the sheer grandeur of the lunar landscape and would become one of only a handful of men to go prospecting in the mountains of the Moon.

Eugene Andrew Cernan, a self-described ‘‘second-generation American of Czech and Slovak descent’’, was born in Chicago, Illinois, on 14 March 1934. As a young boy, he learned from his father how machinery worked, how to plant tomatoes, how to hammer a nail straight into a board and how to repair a toilet; all of which instilled in him an ethos ‘‘to always do my best at whatever I put my hand to’’. In high school, that ethos led him to play basketball, baseball and football, for which he was even offered scholarships, but eventually he headed to Purdue University in 1952 to read electrical engineering.

Four years later, Cernan graduated and was commissioned a naval reservist, reporting for duty aboard the aircraft carrier Saipan. After initial flight training, he received his wings of gold as a naval aviator in November 1957 and gained his first experience of flying jets aboard the F-9F Panther. He was subsequently assigned to Miramar Naval Air Station in San Diego and attached to Attack Squadron VA-126, during which time he performed his first carrier landing aboard the aircraft carrier Ranger, flying the A-4 Skyhawk. Then, in November 1958, Cernan participated in his first cruise of the western Pacific, flying Skyhawks from the Shangri-La aircraft carrier, when, ‘‘armed to the teeth and ready for a fight’’, he frequently encountered Chinese MiG fighters in the Straits of Formosa.

Shortly thereafter, the Mercury Seven were introduced to the world and Cernan heard about, and for the first time wondered about, the role of these new ‘astronauts’. In his autobiography, he noted that he met just two of NASA’s requirements – age and degree relevance – and had little of their experience and no test-piloting credentials. ‘‘By the time I earned those kind of credentials,” he wrote, ‘‘the pioneering in space would be over.’’ Still, the germ of a new interest, to become a test pilot and fly rockets, implanted itself in the young aviator’s brain.

In the early summer of 1961, now married to Barbara Atchley, Cernan was approaching the end of his five-year commitment to the Navy when he was offered the opportunity to attend the service’s postgraduate school for a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering. It offered him a route into test pilot school. When NASA selected its second group of astronauts in September 1962 Cernan knew that, although he held the right educational credentials, becoming a test pilot was still years away. Ultimately, however, the decision was made for him when one of his superiors recommended him to NASA for its third astronaut class.

As 1963 drew to a close, and by now the father of a baby daughter, Tracy, whose initials he would one day etch into the lunar dust at the valley of Taurus-Littrow, Cernan was repeatedly summoned to an unending cycle of physical and psychological evaluations and interviews by the space agency. Like so many others before him, he checked into Houston’s Rice Hotel under the assumed name of‘Max Peck’ and sat, ‘‘like a prisoner before the parole board’’, at an interview with such famous men as Al Shepard, Wally Schirra and Deke Slayton. The questions were awkward. ‘‘Someone asked how many times I had flown over 50,000 feet,’’ Cernan wrote. ‘‘Hell, for an attack pilot like me, who had spent his life below 500 feet, that was halfway to space!’’ How to turn the question to his advantage? He flipped it around, telling them that he had flown very low and ‘‘if you’re going to land on the Moon, you gotta get close sometime’’.

He was also getting close to actual selection, as friends began calling to enquire as to why FBI agents had visited them with questions about Cernan’s character, his background, his military record, his educational record, his parking tickets and his disciplinary records. At the same time, he was close to completing his master’s thesis, focusing on the use of hydrogen as a propulsion system for high-energy rockets. Then, just a few weeks before John Kennedy’s assassination, he received the telephone call from Deke Slayton that would truly change his life. Little did he know that one of his Navy buddies, Ron Evans, rejected by NASA on this occasion, would himself be hired in 1966 and the two of them would someday travel to the Moon together.

Cernan’s first two years as an astronaut were spent mired in technical assignments… and, despite being just one of a much larger gaggle of prospective spacegoing pilots, he and his colleagues still benefitted from the Life magazine deal, which nicely supplemented their military salaries. During the early Gemini flights, he occupied the ‘Tanks’ console in Mission Control, overseeing pressurisation and other data for the Titan II’s fuel tanks. Then, one day towards the end of 1965, a technician tapped on his office door and told Cernan that Slayton wanted him to get fitted out for a space suit. The reason was inescapable: a flight assignment, surely, was just around the corner.

On 8 November, it was official: Cernan and Stafford would support Elliot See and

Charlie Bassett, with an expectation that they could then rotate into the prime crew slot for the Gemini XII mission. Four months later, just promoted to lieutenant- commander by the Navy, Cernan had a new assignment. He and Stafford were now the Gemini IX prime crew and it would be Cernan, not Bassett, who would evaluate the AMU rocket armchair during one of the trickiest and most hazardous spacewalks ever attempted.