Kathy Parks
1 posts
Fifty-three years ago, December 1972.While Ron Evans circled alone in lunar orbit, two men on the surface were quietly rewriting history.Gene Cernan raised his Hasselblad and froze a moment that still takes your breath away: Harrison “Jack” Schmitt (the only professional scientist ever to walk on another world) stands beside the parked lunar rover at the edge of Shorty Crater. Black sky blazing with unblinking stars above, dead-gray desert below, and a lone astronaut in a gleaming white suit staring into the void.A few steps from this exact spot, Schmitt suddenly dropped to one knee, flicked on his floodlight, and let out the most understated exclamation in exploration history:“There’s orange soil! It’s really orange!”It wasn’t just pretty dirt. It was tiny glass beads forged in a lunar fire-fountain volcano 3.5 billion years ago (an ancient eruption flash-frozen in time).Cernan and Schmitt spent 75 hours on the Moon, drove the rover more than 35 kilometers, and brought home 110 kilograms of rocks and soil (still the unbroken record).Since then, no new human boot prints have disturbed the dust.This photograph, taken at the rim of Shorty Crater, remains the last image ever taken of a human on the Moon by another human on the Moon.For now, Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt are still the final two who walked there.
English