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Ronald Evans

1933–1990 · 57 years Specialist

The astronaut who orbited the Moon alone for six days

Portrait of Ronald Evans — NASA — 1971-09-21 — Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Ronald Evans grew up in the small Kansas town of St. Francis, where his brother Larry Joe died of liver cancer at 19 while Ronald was still in high school. He earned an electrical engineering degree at the University of Kansas in 1956, married Jan Pollom that December, and joined the Navy the same year, winning his wings as a fighter pilot in 1957. He flew F8U Crusaders off carriers through the early 1960s, added a master's degree in aeronautical engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School in 1964, and then flew 112 combat missions over Vietnam from the USS Ticonderoga, earning the Navy Commendation Medal before NASA selected him as an astronaut in 1966.

Evans spent six years supporting other missions — ground communications for Apollo 7 and Apollo 11, backup command module pilot for Apollo 14 and the Apollo-Soyuz mission — before NASA assigned him to fly Apollo 17 in December 1972, the last crewed mission to the Moon. While Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt spent three days exploring the lunar surface below, Evans orbited alone for 147 hours and 43 minutes, a record for time in lunar orbit that still stands. On the way home he climbed out of the spacecraft for a one-hour spacewalk to retrieve film canisters from the service module, performed farther from any planet than any spacewalk before or since. He splashed down on December 19, 1972, having orbited the Moon 75 times, and stayed with NASA as a backup pilot until 1977.

For a portion of every one of his 75 orbits, Evans passed behind the Moon and out of radio contact with Houston and with Cernan and Schmitt exploring below, alone in the spacecraft with a dead world in one window and a live one 240,000 miles past it in the other. He had trained six years and flown in support of four other missions before getting a seat of his own, and once it was over there was nowhere left to go: Apollo 17 was the last lunar mission NASA ever flew, and Evans left the astronaut corps in 1977 for private-sector consulting jobs, eventually trying to build a space-themed amusement park that never opened. He died in his sleep of a heart attack in Scottsdale, Arizona, in 1990, at 56, working as a marketing consultant.

His lunar-orbit record has never been broken, for the plain reason that no human being has returned to the Moon since his own crew came home in December 1972. Kansas named him its Kansan of the Year that same year, and the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame inducted him in 1997, seven years after his death. He remains the answer to a trivia question more than a household name, the last command module pilot of the Apollo program, orbiting alone while two more famous crewmates got the moonwalk and the headlines.

Lifespan

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Ronald Evans's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

Apollo 17 mission
Final crewed lunar mission; Evans orbited while Cernan and Schmitt explored the surface 1972
Trans-Earth spacewalk mission
Farthest spacewalk from any planetary body, performed to retrieve film canisters 1972
CAPCOM service, Apollo 7, 11, and 14 other
Served as capsule communicator for three missions before flying his own 1969