In February 1971, while two astronauts played golf on the lunar surface, a quiet experiment circled overhead. Stuart Roosa sat alone in the Command Module “Kitty Hawk,” orbiting the Moon 34 times with precious cargo tucked into his personal kit. Inside a small canvas pouch, around 2,000 seeds waited for their return to Earth.

Roosa had once parachuted into burning forests as a smoke jumper. Now he carried loblolly pine, sycamore, sweetgum, redwood, and Douglas fir seeds through the void of space. Scientists on Earth wondered if lunar orbit would change how these seeds grew. Nobody knew if they would survive the journey. Nobody knew that decades later, most of them would vanish without a trace.

A Smoke Jumper’s Cargo

Before Stuart Roosa became an astronaut, he fought fires. As a young man working for the U.S. Forest Service, he parachuted into burning forests as a smoke jumper. Ed Cliff, Chief of the Forest Service, remembered Roosa from those dangerous days. When Cliff learned that his former smoke jumper would orbit the Moon aboard Apollo 14, an idea took shape.

Cliff contacted Roosa about carrying seeds into space. A joint NASA and Forest Service project soon formed, with Stan Krugman of the Forest Service taking charge of seed selection. Five tree species made the cut for the mission. Loblolly pine, sycamore, sweetgum, redwood, and Douglas fir seeds would travel farther than any trees had gone before.

Krugman’s team sorted and classified each seed with care. Workers sealed them in small plastic bags and stored them inside a metal canister. Control seeds remained on Earth for later comparison. Scientists wanted to know if the lunar orbit would change anything about how these seeds grew.

On January 31, 1971, Apollo 14 launched into the afternoon sky. Five days later, Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell descended to the lunar surface in the Lunar Module while Roosa stayed behind. As his crewmates walked on the Moon and Shepard famously hit golf balls across the dusty terrain, Roosa kept watch over his unusual cargo. For every orbit around the Moon, those seeds traveled with him, waiting for the long journey home.

Seeds Packed for Space

Roosa’s personal kit was a simple canvas pouch that stayed with him throughout the mission. Inside sat the metal canister holding seeds from five distinct tree species. Each type came from American forests where these trees had grown for generations.

Loblolly pines dominate Southern forests from Texas to Florida. American sycamores grow along riverbanks and in wetlands across the eastern United States. Sweetgum trees produce spiky seed balls and brilliant fall colors. Coast redwoods tower over California’s foggy coastline. Douglas firs blanket the Pacific Northwest with their distinctive silhouettes.

Scientists chose these species for their adaptability and their symbolic connection to American forests. If the seeds survived and grew, they would represent something new in the relationship between humans, trees, and space.

A Burst of Bad Luck

Apollo 14 splashed down on February 9, 1971. Roosa and his crew had completed 34 orbits around the Moon. But the mission’s success nearly turned into failure before the experiment could begin.

After recovery, NASA subjected everything that had traveled to space to decontamination procedures. During that process, something went wrong. “Unfortunately, the seed bags burst open during the decontamination procedures after their return to Earth, and the seeds were scattered about the chamber and exposed to vacuum, and it was thought they might not be viable,” NASA explains.

Stan Krugman gathered the scattered seeds from the chamber floor. Months of planning and a journey of nearly half a million miles had led to seeds strewn across a decontamination room. Scientists feared the worst. Exposure to a vacuum can destroy living cells. Many assumed the entire experiment had failed before it truly began.

Against the Odds, They Grew

Krugman refused to give up. He collected the scattered seeds and attempted germination in Houston. What happened next surprised everyone involved.

Seeds began to sprout. Despite their exposure to vacuum, despite the chaos of the burst bags, life found a way. However, Houston’s facilities proved inadequate for nurturing young seedlings. Many of the early sprouts died because the growing conditions could not support them.

A year after the mission, workers transported the remaining seeds to research stations better suited for plant propagation. Southern species went to the Forest Service station in Gulfport, Mississippi. Sycamore, loblolly pine, and sweetgum seeds arrived there for germination. Western species traveled to Placerville, California, where redwood and Douglas fir seeds found a more appropriate home.

Teams at both stations worked to germinate the remaining seeds. Many sprouted successfully. Others grew from cuttings taken from the first successful seedlings. By the time the project concluded, around 450 viable seedlings stood ready for planting.

Bicentennial Gifts Across the Nation and World

America’s bicentennial celebration in 1976 provided the perfect occasion to distribute Moon Trees. Forest Service workers and NASA officials sent seedlings to state forestry organizations across the country. Because these were Southern and Western species, not all states received trees. Climate and growing conditions limited where each species could thrive.

A loblolly pine found a home at the White House. Trees took root at Washington Square in Philadelphia, where the nation’s founders once walked. Valley Forge, a site of sacrifice during the Revolutionary War, received its own Moon Tree. Planters placed another in the International Forest of Friendship in Atchison, Kansas.

Distribution extended beyond American borders. Brazil and Switzerland received Moon Trees. Japan’s Emperor Hirohito accepted a tree as a gift from the United States. Universities and NASA centers across reportedly 40 states planted seedlings on their grounds.

President Gerald Ford sent telegrams to many recipients of Bicentennial Moon Trees. His message captured the spirit of the occasion. “This tree which was carried by Astronauts Stuart Roosa, Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell on their mission to the moon, is a living symbol of our spectacular human and scientific achievements,” Ford wrote. “It is a fitting tribute to our national space program which has brought out the best of American patriotism, dedication and determination to succeed.”

Lost to Time and Poor Signage

Here is where the story takes an unexpected turn. After all the ceremony and celebration, after telegrams from the President and plantings at historic sites, most Moon Trees simply disappeared from memory.

Many trees went into the ground without any identifying markers. No official list tracked where each seedling ended up. No systematic record documented which trees survived and which did not. As years passed, the people who planted these trees retired, moved away, or died. Institutional memory faded. Trees that had orbited the Moon stood in parks and schoolyards with nothing to distinguish them from ordinary plantings.

For two decades, Moon Trees grew in obscurity. Some thrived. Others succumbed to disease, storms, or development. Without markers or records, nobody could say how many remained.

In 1996, a third-grade teacher in Cannelton, Indiana, asked NASA a simple question about Moon Trees. Her inquiry reached Dave Williams, a NASA scientist who realized that no database of Moon Tree locations existed. Williams began the painstaking work of tracking down the scattered trees.

Using archival newspaper clippings from the 1970s, Williams and his colleagues located around 110 of the original Moon Trees. Nearly 30 of those had already died in the decades since their planting. Hundreds more remained unaccounted for, their locations lost to time and inadequate record-keeping.

A Second Generation Takes Root

Stuart Roosa never saw the full effort to catalog his trees. He passed away in December 1994, two years before Williams began his search. After Apollo 14, Roosa had served as backup command module pilot for Apollo 16 and 17 before working on the Space Shuttle program. He retired as a Colonel from the Air Force in 1976, the same year many of his trees found their permanent homes.

In 2011, Roosa’s daughter Rosemary founded the Moon Tree Foundation to honor her father’s legacy. Her organization works to distribute second-generation Moon Trees grown from seeds and cuttings of the original space-faring plants.

When Hurricane Irma destroyed the original Moon Tree at Kennedy Space Center in 2017, Rosemary’s foundation responded. Workers planted twelve second-generation Moon Trees at the site to replace what the storm had taken. New growth rose from the genetic material of trees that had circled the Moon nearly half a century earlier.

After more than forty years of observation, scientists found no detectable difference between Moon Trees and their Earth-bound control counterparts. Lunar orbit left no visible mark on the seeds or the trees that grew from them. Yet these trees carry a history that ordinary plantings cannot match.

Artemis Carries the Tradition Forward

In 2022, NASA honored the Apollo 14 mission by sending a new generation of seeds beyond the Moon. Artemis I, an uncrewed mission, carried approximately 1,000 tree seeds on a journey totaling 2.3 million kilometers. Giant sequoia seeds replaced coast redwood in the updated selection, as sequoias grow more readily in parks and arboretums.

Unlike their Apollo predecessors, Artemis Moon Tree seedlings will face better tracking. NASA has planted seedlings at 236 sites across the United States, with documentation to prevent another mass disappearance. Students frequently visit these trees, connecting with space exploration through living organisms they can see and touch.

Adria Gillespie, district science coach at Greenfield Union School District in Greenfield, California, described the impact on her students. “Through class visits to the tree, students have gained a lot of interest in caring for the tree,” Gillespie said in a NASA statement, “and their curiosity for the unknown in outer space sparked them to do research of their own to get answers to their inquiries.”

NASA hopes these new Moon Trees will grow into maturity with their histories intact. If you happen to know where any of the lost Apollo Moon Trees stand, the agency would like to hear from you.

What We Seek When We Reach Beyond Earth

Sending seeds around the Moon might seem like a small gesture compared to landing astronauts on the lunar surface. Yet Moon Trees carry meaning that reaches beyond their scientific value.

When those seed packets burst in the decontamination chamber, scientists assumed failure. Life proved more stubborn than anyone expected. Seeds that had traveled through the vacuum of space, that had scattered across a sterile floor, still found the will to grow. From disaster came 450 seedlings and a global distribution of living history.

Moon Trees now stand in schoolyards, parks, and government buildings across multiple continents. Each one grew from a seed that traveled where no tree had gone before. Children who visit these trees often find themselves asking questions about space, about Earth, and about what else might be possible.

Stuart Roosa, a man who once parachuted into forest fires, carried seeds into lunar orbit not because anyone demanded it. Curiosity and wonder drove the experiment forward. In that way, Moon Trees serve as quiet reminders that pushing past assumed limits can produce something lasting and beautiful. When we reach beyond our planet, we often bring back more than data or samples. Sometimes we bring back seeds that grow into symbols of what we can accomplish when we refuse to accept boundaries as permanent.

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