Hi there. I'm Washington Post reporter Lillian Cunningham. Stay tuned after the show to hear about my latest podcast, Moonrise. It's the dark but true story of why we went to the moon and what we found there. The full series is available now.

Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past.

Rediscovered.

Everyone knows the first person on the moon, Neil Armstrong, and his famous words upon taking

that first step.

That's one small step for man.

One giant leap for man.

But in the nearly five decades since humans walked on the moon, you never hear much, if ever, about the last astronaut to stand on that very foreign and very far away

lunar surface.

That honor goes to a fellow named Eugene Sernan, and it turns out that the words he spoke

before returning to Earth are just as poignant as that guy Armstrong.

By the time Cernan made his trip to the moon as commander of Apollo 17 in 1972, he was already a veteran astronaut.

He flew on the Gemini 9 mission in 1966, during which he became the second American to walk in space.

I guess Sernan was a guy who maybe didn't like to go first.

Anyway, he was the lunar module pilot for Apollo 10, which circled the moon.

And when he finally had a chance to step foot on the

moon, he was, naturally, gobsmacked. In a 2007 NASA oral history, he described the experience

almost like someone texting home from a cruise. Sunshine the whole three days we were there, he said.

But really, the trip was literally otherworldly.

The astronauts were surrounded, he said,

by the blackest black that we can conceive in our mind.

And yet, as far away as he stood from his hometown near Chicago,

...