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Headline: Astronaut Gene Cernan 'The Last Man on the Moon': Handwritten Moon-Worn Notes For Auction

Caption: A wrist-cuff worn by the last man on the moon is up for auction. On December 14, 1972, Apollo 17 Commander Gene Cernan delivered some of the final words spoken from the lunar surface – and he used crib notes attached to his astronaut suit arm. On his wrist was his EVA-3 cuff checklist, and on the bottom of the last page he had written some notes to jog his memory for this speech: "Chall[enge] of Apollo. Door Promise." The Apollo program was over, and mankind knew not when it would return to another celestial body. Standing before the American flag, he delivered these words: "I think probably one of the most significant things we can think about when we think about Apollo is that it has opened for us—'for us' being the world—a challenge of the future. The door is now cracked, but the promise of the future lies in the young people, not just in America, but the young people all over the world learning to live and learning to work together." An upcoming auction by Boston-based RR Auction will feature Gene Cernan's Apollo 17 EVA-3 cuff checklist.  Commander Cernan died 16 January 2017. Cernan wore this cuff checklist on his wrist for the duration of the final EVA of Apollo 17, exposing it to the lunar environment for 7 hours and 15 minutes. The cuff checklist is a comprehensive guide for the extravehicular activity, offering preparation procedures, simplified maps of traverse routes and landmarks. Cernan also penned the text of the Lunar Plaque to be left on the surface, and read it aloud during the broadcast of his final moments on the Moon. Hopping over to the base of the Lunar Module' Challenger,' he described the pictorial elements of the plaque, then spoke its words: "Here man completed his first exploration of the Moon, December 1972 A.D. May the spirit of peace in which we came be reflected in the lives of all mankind'…This is our commemoration that will be here until someone like us, until some of you who are out there, who are the promise of the future, come back to read it again and to further the exploration and the meaning of Apollo." The checklist occupies a special place in Apollo history—it not only provided instructions for man's last moonwalk— but held the handwritten notes for the last words spoken from the surface of the Moon. This historic speech echoed the words of Neil Armstrong from three years earlier: mankind had made its giant leap, and Commander Cernan looked forward to a peaceful, hopeful future. Cernan's cuff checklists for EVA-1 and EVA-2 were sold privately, making this the first—and most historically significant—to be publicly offered. "Coming directly from the estate of Gene Cernan, it is a priceless Apollo artifact that would be the centerpiece of the finest private or institutional collections," said Bobby Livingston, Executive VP at RR Auction. Online bidding for the Space Exploration and aviation sale from RR Auction will begin October 8 and conclude October 15.

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