Listen 5 min

       Share

       Comment on this story Comment

       Though Stuart Roosa loved being in the great outdoors — he’d once been a U.S. Forest Service smokejumper — the job he held at the beginning of 1971 made being outdoors an impossibility. Roosa was the command module pilot on NASA’s Apollo 14 mission, responsible for circling the moon alone while Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell cavorted on the lunar surface below.

       Fast, informative and written just for locals. Get The 7 DMV newsletter in your inbox every weekday morning. ArrowRight

       But Roosa had brought a bit of the outdoors with him. Among his personal belongings was a canister packed with hundreds of tree seeds: loblolly pine, Douglas fir, redwood, sweetgum and sycamore. Last week, Answer Man visited one of the trees grown from those seeds.

       “It’s a beautiful tree,” said Dave Williams, admiring a sycamore standing tall outside the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

       Williams is the unofficial archivist of the so-called “Moon Trees,” roughly 120 of which were planted around the world. It isn’t really Williams’s job — he’s a planetary scientist who works on preserving data collected on the Apollo missions and making it available to researchers — but in 1996 a letter came his way from a third-grade teacher in Indiana.

       Advertisement

       “They were doing a class project on local trees,” Williams said. “Someone in the class had been at a Girl Scout camp and remembered seeing a tree there with a plaque that just said ‘Moon Tree.’ There was really nothing else.”

       And so Williams set about reconstructing the history of the Moon Trees.

       Before Roosa began his career with the U.S. Air Force and NASA, he’d been a smokejumper, jumping into active fires in California and Oregon. When he was selected for Apollo 14, the brass at the Forest Service saw an opportunity.

       “They tried to couch the idea of taking seeds up as a science experiment,” said Williams. “It really wasn’t. It was more of a public relations thing.”

       And it was nearly a public relations disaster. After their return to Earth, articles flown in space were subject to a decontamination process. During it, the seed canister burst, scattering the seeds inside the vacuum chamber. There were fears the seeds wouldn’t be viable, but they germinated when planted.

       NASA had mixed success with them — growing trees isn’t really the space agency’s thing — so it was decided other seeds would be planted by the Forest Service. Those fared better and by the Bicentennial, the Forest Service announced that saplings were available to organizations that wanted them.

       Advertisement

       Trees were planted across the country and in at least two foreign countries. But, said Williams, “There wasn’t systematic record keeping.”

       Share this article Share

       He set about assembling a list of the trees, with information on where they were planted, which ones are known to have died and those whose status is unknown. Whenever Williams gleans new information on a Moon Tree, he adds it to the web site he built.

       “I like the fact that if you look through the list, there are some places you’ve never heard of,” Williams said. “It wasn’t just state capitol buildings and Goddard Space Flight Center and the White House. A lot of trees got sent to little towns, little parks, tiny museums or community colleges, places that, for them, this is like a huge deal.”

       There’s a loblolly pine grown from a space seed outside the VA Medical Center in Tuskegee, Ala., a sycamore outside the public library in Keystone Heights, Fla., a sweetgum in Scott Jenkins Memorial Park in Loudoun County, Va. There’s a redwood growing at the Brazilian Institute for Environment and Natural Renewable Resources in Brasília.

       Advertisement

       About 70 trees are still alive, including the sycamore outside Goddard’s visitors center. Williams sometimes jokes that the space-flown trees have tentacles or glow in the dark, but the truth is the Moon Trees are absolutely normal. Not that they don’t have their devotees. From time to time, Williams hears from people who are a little obsessed with the trees and wish to visit as many as they can.

       Roosa died in 1994, before Williams had a chance to speak with him. But Williams connected with the late astronaut’s children. Daughter Rosemary Roosa runs the Moon Tree Foundation, which makes second generation saplings available.

       And the spirit of the Moon Trees grows in a new initiative. In November of 2022, NASA’s uncrewed Orion spacecraft orbited the moon, part of the Artemis program. On board were nearly 2,000 tree seeds. (Giant sequoia seeds replaced the redwoods of the earlier mission.) Educational and community organizations are invited to apply for a sapling.

       Apollo 14 may be best known for astronaut Shepard swinging a golf club on the lunar surface. But the Moon Trees may be a greater legacy.

       “You can’t touch the moon, but you can touch something that’s been to the moon,” said Williams.

       And to those who say the seeds didn’t actually land on the moon, Williams says, “It’s closer to the moon than you’ll ever get.”

       Share

       Comments

       John Kelly’s Washington

       HAND CURATED

       In the District, the house the trash collectors forgot

       May 16, 2023

       In the District, the house the trash collectors forgot

       May 16, 2023

       Dan Snyder may be selling the team, but I still want an apology

       May 17, 2023

       Dan Snyder may be selling the team, but I still want an apology

       May 17, 2023

       Squirrel! Here are the winners from the 2023 squirrel photo contest.

       April 12, 2023

       Squirrel! Here are the winners from the 2023 squirrel photo contest.

       April 12, 2023

       View 3 more stories

       Loading...

       View more