The Last Man on the Moon

A wild new cowboy on the move.

He placed last night, second. Going for first.

How many y'all wanna see that replay?

Following cowboy in hot water.

Come on big Jake, show 'em how.

Yeah.

Mission sequence start.

Engines on five, four...

Three, two...

I'm the luckiest human being in the world.

There... fire going.

I don't go around living in the past,

for the most part.

But ever once in while

you let yourself go back in time.

I'll look up there...

And I might just reflect

for a half a minute or so.

I can take myself there at the speed of thought.

Okay, stand by for pitchover.

Oh, are we coming in?

Pitchover.

There it is. Proceeded.

And there it is Houston.

There's Camelot. Right on target.

I see it.

We got 'em all.

25 feet per second through 400.

That's a little high, geno.

Okay.

Very little dust.

40 feet. Going down at three.

Stand by for touchdown.

Stand by.

20 feet.

Going down at two.

10 feet.

And contact.

Stop, push. Engine stop.

Engine arm, proceed. Command override, off.

As soon as you hit the surface,

the dust is gone, engine is shut down.

There's no noise.

You are magically in another world.

It was the ultimate

quiet moment in my life.

Pure silence.

Absolutely incredible.

I spent a lot of time growing up

on my grandparents' farm in Wisconsin.

No electricity.

No tractors, just horses.

So my desire in life was

to sometime have a ranch.

It's where I can just be who I am.

I keep thinking, "my dad always would have loved this."

He was a Jack of all trades,

he could fix... rewire your house or build you a garage,

or fix the plumbing in your bathroom,

and that's why I learned to do all those things with him.

He said, "I don't care whether you're in a classroom,

on a football field, or whatever you do..."

Barron?

"Just do your best.

And someday, I promise you.

You're gonna surprise yourself."

It's like coming down the l.E.M.

Only if I fall here, I break my butt.

1170 kcbq, the legendary gene cernan is with us.

Now about the Navy, talk a little bit about...

Because this is a big Navy town, as you know,

and you spent time here.

I tell ya, San Diego is...

Is like another home.

I spent my best years coming out of pensacola

here in San Diego.

From the time I was 22

until I was 27, this was my life.

In and out of San Diego,

flying off aircraft carriers.

This is where it all started for me.

At that point, 22, 25,

you're invincible and you're bulletproof

there isn't anything you can't do,

you know, risk be damned.

The fact of life is,

naval aviation is a risky process.

You don't have much room for error.

If you get sloppy, you're gonna kill yourself

You live within that environment,

you live within that culture,

but you love it, and you keep doing it,

and it doesn't discourage you,

'cause it's not gonna happen to me.

You know, it isn't gonna happen...

It's always gonna happen to the other guy.

He screwed up. I'm not gonna screw up.

That was the attitude you had to have.

- Is that you? - Course it is.

That is you. _ red hot naval aviator.

Invincible, invisible, and bulletproof

- remember? - That's a stretch.

There we are. That's it.

The stingers. Here we go, up over the top.

The diamond roll there it is.

- God, that was fun, baldy. - Yeah, we were flying.

I made my first cruise with gene

on the old u.S.S. Shangri-la.

It was constant competition.

Who could land better on the carrier.

Who could bomb better on the carrier.

We used to grab airplanes

and go up and tail chase around the clouds.

We were... we were pretty impressed with ourselves.

We have big egos.

But I think you have to have a big ego

to be able to do the intense type of flying

that we were trained to do.

When you land a plane on a carrier

in the daytime is tricky enough.

But when you do it at night,

you're not thinking about your girlfriend.

Well, gene might have been, but I wasn't.

I was... I was dead serious.

Now, cernan, who knows?

Uh, he's kinda loose sometimes that way.

Jesus. Now we got a fire.

If you think back

when you and I were in 113 together, okay?

We flew together all the time,

but were we competitive with each other?

I was a hell of a lot better left wing man,

than you were right wing man.

No. No, but I was a hell of a lot better bomber than you were.

You were lucky if you even hit the damn ground.

Why were you so weak in bombing, gene?

You were the weapons training officer.

Baldy, it's 240,000 miles away.

Anybody could hit that.

And my c.E.P. Was 50 miles.

You were average in bombing.

You were pretty good at getting aboard the boat.

I knew you had a little fear at night.

Do I have to listen to this crap?

Do... if I have to listen to this...

I'm gonna make a circle over the field.

But I'll come in behind you.

Flying is a big part of my life.

You got to have a passion,

a love for what you're doing,

or you shouldn't be doing it.

I was an airline stewardess

for continental airlines and I lived in Los Angeles.

And I was in the airport and he was in the line.

I did not remember him,

but he said I smiled at him

and he just thought that I was great.

And I thought later...

I thought what he doesn't know,

I have to smile at everybody

because that was part of my job.

The first time he came to my house.

He had a... I think it was, like, a '56 Chevrolet

and it had kind of loud mufflers on it.

I thought, "oh, my lord,

he's a hot rod of some sort."

She says she heard that

when I pulled into the driveway.

And she said, "oh, my god, what have I gotten into?"

Well...

We were very much in love.

He was everything I could have asked for.

And so we bought a home,

and I started working.

And I worked and then I worked

up until I had Tracy,

and that was two years after we were married.

He was great with her.

He was really... he was good,

and crazy about her.

He still is.

That's his "punk."

He calls her "punk."

Man had his first great success in space,

when the Russians pushed a man across the threshold.

He was Yuri gagarin,

the astronaut the Russians lionized

as the first to orbit the earth.

It was the propaganda coup of the year.

After the Russian flight, U.S. plans were accelerated.

Commander Alan b. Shepard

was sent into suborbital flight.

Unlike the Russian venture,

this took place in the white hot glare

of World-Wide publicity.

It was period of time

when America needed a hero desperately,

and Alan became that hero of the astronauts.

The Mercury seven were the real pathfinders

of what was to happen in the future,