In 1971, an Apollo 14 astronaut carried hundreds of tree seeds around the Moon, and most Americans have no idea they are walking past them every day

You’ve probably walked past one without even knowing it. In a park, outside a courthouse, on a college campus, a perfectly ordinary-looking tree, maybe with a small plaque at its base. Except that tree has been to the moon.

They are called Moon Trees and their story is one of the strangest and most quietly beautiful chapters of the American space program.

The smokejumper who took seeds to space
It begins with a man named Stuart Roosa. Roosa had been a smokejumper for the US Forest Service before he became an astronaut. Smokejumpers are firefighters who parachute out of planes into remote wilderness to fight wildfires. In 1971, Forest Service Chief Edward Cliff assigned him to Apollo 14 and he called with an unusual idea: take tree seeds for the ride.


Stan Krugman, a geneticist with the Forest Service, was asked to select the seeds. He chose five species: loblolly pine, sycamore, sweetgum, redwood and Douglas fir. The seeds were in small plastic bags, sealed inside a metal canister in Roosa’s personal kit. Scientists left control seeds on Earth to compare with the others later.

Fellow crew members Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell spent two days exploring the lunar surface, while Roosa conducted experiments aboard the command capsule, with the seeds in tow. He made 34 complete lunar orbits before the return trip to Earth. The seeds never touched the Moon, but they circled it dozens of times, farther than almost any plant material had ever traveled.

When it nearly all went wrong
Apollo 14 returned, and the seed bags burst open during decontamination procedures. The seeds were scattered, exposed to a vacuum, and thought to be non-viable. The experiment seemed to be as good as dead.

But Krugman collected the seeds and attempted to grow them nevertheless. To everyone's surprise, many of them began to grow. When the researchers compared the seeds that were flown in space with controls kept on Earth, there were no significant differences in the way the seeds grew or looked. Space travel hadn’t visibly changed them.

This finding was important. A peer-reviewed study published in Seed Science Research on Cambridge Core has shown that seed biology experiments in space have taught us a lot about how seeds respond to microgravity and radiation, and the research continues to offer insights into how plants might survive long-duration missions to the Moon and Mars. The Moon Trees were among the first of this kind of biological inquiry, long before it became a formal research focus.

Sprouted all over America, often without fanfare
The Forest Service grew the Apollo 14 Moon Trees into seedlings and distributed them to dignitaries around the world. A large number were planted in honor of the nation’s bicentennial celebrations. They visited the White House, state capitols, universities, schools, NASA sites and memorials. Some were even sent to Brazil, Switzerland and Japan.

But here’s the thing: nobody kept a proper master list. Time took away some of the trees' plaques. Some were lost for good. A sycamore or a loblolly pine that grew from a seed that went around the Moon looks no different from one that never left the ground. That's part of why most people don't even know about them.

The tradition continues
The story did not end with Apollo. NASA said that it partnered with the USDA Forest Service to launch almost 2,000 seeds of five different tree species into space on the Artemis I mission in late 2022. Those seeds, sycamores, sweetgums, Douglas firs, loblolly pines, and giant sequoias, were taken to eight USDA Forest Service facilities where they were grown into seedlings over the next year. These new-generation Moon Trees have since been planted in schools, museums, universities and community organizations across the country.

The first recipient of an Artemis Moon Tree was the US Capitol, which received a sweetgum, a species that can grow up to 70 feet tall.

Why do they still matter
Moon rocks sit behind glass. Spacecraft are in museums. But Moon Trees are out in the weather, losing their leaves in the fall and budding anew each spring. They are living monuments that don’t ask anything of you; they just grow, quietly, with their history.

The next time you are on a college campus or walking through a state park, look for a small plaque near a mature tree. You might be standing under a fragment of the Apollo era and not even realize it.