EVERETT/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK Cernan pictured on the Moon

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ASCENDING the landing module ladder for Apollo 17’s perilous journey back to Earth, Commander Eugene Cernan paused, aware that he was leaving the last human footprints in the grey lunar dust for some time to come. “I looked back at Earth in all its splendour – I call it sitting on God’s front porch, looking home – then down at my last footprint and realised: ‘Hey, I’m not coming this way again’.” The Nasa astronaut had no idea that 44 years later his would still be the last marks of human life left on the moon. “I honestly believed it wasn’t the end but the beginning,” says Cernan, an athletic, white-haired, gravelvoiced 82-year-old with a steely gaze and chiselled jaw, who could be Clint Eastwood’s stunt double. “I thought we’d be on our way to Mars by the turn of the century.” Cernan, who is the subject of an award-winning new British documentary, The Last Man on the Moon, which opens on April 8, is one of only 12 humans to set foot on the moon. He remains one of only seven still alive. He orbited Earth on Gemini 9 in 1966, skimmed only eight miles above the moon on Apollo 10 in 1969, holds the world record as the fastest human ever for his return to Earth at 24,791mph, and as commander of Apollo 17 spent three days on the moon in December 1972, setting a lunar spacewalk record of 22 hours. Now an aerospace consultant and Texas longhorn cattle rancher, who continues to pilot his own planes, Cernan laments America’s loss of pioneering spirit and reveals the terrible price he paid pursuing his dreams of space travel, sacrificing fatherhood and his marriage.

GETTY Cernan could be Clint Eastwood's stunt double

Fierce competition among Nasa’s astronauts for prized seats on missions meant that families were routinely neglected. “I was working my butt off and I never appreciated what was going on at home,” says Cernan, who admits that astronauts’ wives carried the domestic load. “They’d be home taking care of the kids, paying the bills, seeing the kids get to school and do their homework. We were unfair. We were selfish.” His close friend, Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean, agrees: “We weren’t very good husbands. We weren’t very good fathers either.” For the astronauts’ wives, watching their husbands depart on hazardous missions could be equally stressful. “If you think going to the moon is hard, try staying home,” says Cernan’s former wife, Barbara, who suffered through his astronaut years. “It’s very, very trying.”

GETTY Eugene Cernan and Jan Nanna Cernan attend the OMEGA Speedmaster Houston Event in May 2015

Death was an ever-present fear. Cernan had won his first space flight on Gemini 9 when the two lead pilots died in a test crash. He was friends and neighbours with the three astronauts who died when a flash fire engulfed Apollo 1 on the launch pad in 1967. He was the third man to ever walk in space but could have died when his visor fogged over leaving him blind and flailing at the end of a 25ft cord, and his spacesuit swelled so much in the vacuum of space that he could barely get back through the Gemini 9 hatch. He visits the graves of dead colleagues and wonders: “Why them, not me?” Yet he remains philosophical, focused on the future. “The point is here we are – so what do we do with it?” His race for space also left daughter Tracy longing for her often-absent father. On his return from Apollo 17, an unimpressed Tracy said: “Daddy, now that you’ve been to the moon and back, when are you going to take me camping like you promised?” Cernan still feels the guilt. “I was gone and gone and gone,” he says. “It was a very selfish life on my part.”

SSPL VIA GETTY Cernan struggled to reconcile being an astronaut with being a father

But even back on Earth he remained a distant father and husband, propelled into an endless whirlwind of parades, awards ceremonies, interviews and Nasa publicity campaigns, which continued to take their toll. Wife Barbara recalls: “He was so engrossed in all of this notoriety and travelling and speaking and I got so tired of it. I thought: I just want a normal life. A couple of years after that we ended up separating and going our different ways.” It is the astronaut’s curse, says Cernan: “Some 60 per cent of us got divorced and I’m not proud of it. We were so tunnel-visioned when we were going to the moon.” He didn’t leave just footprints, however. Shortly before departing the moon he scratched his daughter Tracy’s initials, TDC, into the windless lunar surface, where they probably remain today. “Some day, some time, I can only believe that someone will go back and that’s what they will find,” he says. For the new documentary, Cernan revisited Cape Canaveral in Florida, the glittering jewel in Nasa’s space programme, where many Apollo flights launched.

GETTY Cernan has lamented 'the loss of pioneering spirit' in the US

He found it abandoned and forlorn, a decayed wrecking yard of rusting gantries and weeds growing across launch platforms. “Heartbreaking,” he laments. “I don’t want to remember it this way. It’s disappointing.” He finds America’s current drastically diminished space programme equally depressing. “Think about it – 43 years ago I was walking on the moon,” he says. “Today we don’t even have our own spacecraft that will take us to our own orbiting laboratory at the International Space Station. It’s disappointing.” A decade after divorcing Barbara, Cernan found love again with brunette Jan, now his wife of 24 years, with their own children and grandchildren. Yet his passion for space continues to harm his loved ones.

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“When I was in the space programme, I ignored my family,” he says. “I find that I’m getting innuendos from my family… that I’m doing the same thing now.” He still devotes much of his time visiting conventions and promoting space travel, but admits: “I’m finally coming to the realisation that I’ve got to think of somebody else.” The world will never forget Neil Armstrong’s words as he placed the first footprint on the lunar surface: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Cernan wishes that history would remember equally well his own words as he left the last footprint in the lunar dust: “We leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind.”