Ronald Evans (astronaut) 19 astronauts selected by NASA in April 1966. He served as a member of the astronaut support crews for the Apollo 7 and Apollo 11 flights, and as backup Command Module Pilot for Apollo 14. Evans' only space flight was as Command Module Pilot of Apollo 17, the last scheduled U.S. manned mission to the Moon. He was accompanied by Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt. While Cernan and Schmitt landed and worked on the Moon in the Taurus–Littrow valley, Evans remained in lunar orbit on board the Command Module "America", completing assigned work tasks which required visual geological observations, hand-held
NASA Astronaut Group 8 NASA Astronaut Group 8 NASA's Astronaut Group 8 was a group of 35 astronauts announced on January 16, 1978. It was the first selection in nine years of astronaut candidates since Group 7 in August 1969, and also included NASA's first female astronauts. Due to the long delay between the last Apollo lunar mission in 1972 and the first flight of the Space Shuttle in 1981, few astronauts from the older groups stayed with NASA. Since then, a new group of candidates has been selected roughly every two years. In Astronaut Group 8, two different astronaut groups were formed: pilots