When astronaut Eugene Cernan left the surface of the moon after a very active Apollo 17 lunar expedition in 1972, he knew he was the last man on the moon, at least for a while. Cernan, who died Monday at age 82, didn’t have the all-American persona of John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, nor the luck of being first, such as Alan Shepherd as the first American in space or Neil Armstrong as the first man to walk on the moon.