I see nobody has mentioned my favorite fact about him: while the rovers were designed to have a top speed of 8mph, Gene Cernan pushed his to 11.2 mph, more than

I see nobody has mentioned my favorite fact about him: while the rovers were designed to have a top speed of 8mph, Gene Cernan pushed his to 11.2 mph, more than a 40% increase of the maximum speed. If 11.2 mph sounds slow to you, he also set another speed record: highest speed attained by any manned vehicle, 24,791 mph or almost 40,000 kilometers per hour, on Apollo 10's return to Earth. Also, prior missions didn't go more than 3 miles from the LM, but Cernan pushed his to go five miles away. This meant that if the rover failed - remember, this thing had driven on the moon exactly twice at this point - he would have had to walk five miles to the LM in a bulky, heavy spacesuit, in unforgiving conditions on the surface of the Moon.