On January 31, 1971, the Apollo 14 mission was launched from Earth and spent nine days in space. Along with the necessary space equipment, science equipment, and two golf balls, Kitty Hawk’s command module also contained 500 seeds.
You may not know that those seeds survived despite long-lasting space radiation and a decontamination accident and are present today in the form of a tree.
In the 1970s, astronauts carried all kinds of things to the Moon, and the Chief of the United States Forest Service contacted future astronaut Stuart Roosa to propose to send something small but powerful into space: tree seeds.
Long before Roosa became an astronaut, he began his military career as a firefighter specially trained to parachute into remote terrain and fight wildfires. Roosa wanted to pay tribute to the Forest Service, so he agreed to the request.
In Roosa’s personal travel kit were about 500 seeds of redwood, whitish pine (Pinus taeda), American sycamore (Platanus occidentalis), Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii)and American sweetgumLiquidambar styraciflua).
How Roosa was the command module pilot(traveled with astronauts Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell),It never made it to the lunar surface, and neither did the seeds, but they did make 34 orbits of the Moon before heading home.
Once the three astronauts returned to Earth, the seeds (inside their container) underwent the normal decontamination procedure, butthe container broke and the seeds were mixed.At that time, they believed that the seeds were damaged and that they would not be able to germinate.
Fortunately, the researchers tried anyway and found that most of the seeds survived. Almost all of the seeds began to grow, and after a few years, the Forest Service hadmore than 420 seedlings.In 1975 and 1976, most of the seedlings were given to state forestry groups to plant in celebration of the country’s bicentennial. Not all states received trees because all five species were from the western and southern states and would not have thrived in other climates.
Other saplings found prominent homes in the United States, such as the White House, the Kennedy Space Station in Florida, the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, Washington Square in Philadelphia, Valley Forge in Pennsylvania, and several universities. Some trees were given as gifts to other countries, including Brazil, Switzerland, and Japan.
The number of moon trees has increased over the years as moon trees were cut and replanted. These second-generation lunar trees are called crescent trees.
You can see a list of the Moon tree locations here. The trees grew normally, with no observable differences compared to their counterparts on Earth.
But that raises an interesting question: Did the seeds change after their journey into space?
We now know that cosmic radiation, the high-energy particles that we are normally protected against by our planet’s atmosphere, is a real problem in space. Astronauts on the Apollo missions were exposed to several different types of radiation, and that also applies to seeds. However, we know that seeds are extremely hardy, in fact some seeds can undergo 200 times the radiation dose needed to kill a human and still germinate.
There’s also the problem of lack of gravity, and how that might have affected seeds in space, but most research done on plants in microgravity is done on the plants themselves, not the seeds.
Overall, the seeds are unlikely to have changed much from their brief sojourn in space , but it’s amazing that they made it into space, and even better that many of the trees are still growing and flowering.
In fact, in a fitting tribute to Roosa, after her death in 1994, a sycamore from the Moon was placed near her grave , at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.
