Plant News Articles

NASA is on the lookout for some aging travellers who went to the moon and back 40 years ago. The agency has lost track of several hundred trees that orbited the moon aboard the Apollo 14 command module in 1971.

The idea was to see how space travel would affect their ability to sprout. Astronaut Stuart Roosa carried 500 loblolly pine, redwood, sweet gum, sycamore and Douglas fir tree seeds in a canister in his personal kit. After they got back, Stan Krugman of the U.S. Forest Service oversaw planting of the moon seeds and an equivalent number of seeds that hadn't been in orbit to compare their growth. Some 450 of the moon seeds sprouted.

By 1975 the trees had grown large enough to be transplanted. NASA and the Forest Service shipped the saplings out to be planted in parks and at capitol buildings around the country, epecially to honor the country's bicentiennial in 1976.

Twenty years passed and the trees were all but forgotten. Then in 1996, a third-grade teacher at Cannelton Elementary School in Cannelton, Indiana asked her studets to write about local trees. One of the students raised her had and said, "You know, there's this tree at camp that has a sign that says it's a moon tree." The director of the Girl Scout camp remembered that the tree had something to do with NASA.

The class emailed NASA to find out more and got a polite response that said no one had ever heard of it. But it was passed on to Dave Williams, a curator at NASA's National Space Science Data Center. Williams couldn't find anyone who had heard of it either, but was impressed enough with the story to look deeper. Finally, NASA's history office tracked down a few newspaper clippings about some moon tree plantings.

Williams put up a web page about the moon trees to  share the information he had found. Every few months, he would get an e-mail from someone, somewhere, about another moon tree. Now he has accounted for about 79 of them.

If you know of a moon tree, you can e-mail Williams at dave.williams@nasa.gov.