Author: Matt Blitz / Source: Today I Found Out
Only nine months after the near-disaster of Apollo 13, NASA decided to try again with Apollo 14. For the mission, three astronauts were chosen – Edgar Mitchell, Alan Shepard, and Stuart A. Roosa. Shepard had already earned international fame for being the first American, second human overall, in space in 1961, funny enough soaking in his own urine owing to delays in the launch and no bathroom facility on board… Mitchell and Roosa were both accomplished pilots and engineers.
Important to the topic at hand is that years before any of this, in 1953, Roosa took a summer job as a smokejumper for the US Forest Service. It was because of this connection that when it was announced that he’d be a member of the Apollo 14 crew, he was approached with an interesting proposal.
Ed Cliff, the Chief of the Forest Service, called Roosa and asked if he’d be willing to take a metal canister filled with 500 seeds with him aboard Apollo 14. The seeds in question consisted of Douglas fir, sequoia, sycamore, sweetgum, and loblolly pine. Stan Krugman, who worked at the U.S. Forest Service and was put in charge of selecting the seeds, noted, “I picked redwoods because they were well-known, and the others because they would grow well in many parts of the United States. The seeds came from two Forest Service genetics institutes. In most cases we knew their parents (a key requirement for any post-flight genetic studies).”
On that note, a group of control seeds were also kept back on Earth to compare with.
Besides being great publicity, the hope was to use these seeds to study how trees would grow back on Earth after being exposed to space travel. Krugman noted, “The scientists wanted to find out what would happen to these seeds if they took a ride to the Moon. Would they sprout? Would the trees look normal? We also wanted to give them away as part of the [U.S.] Bicentennial celebration in 1976.”
As each astronaut was allowed to carry with them a Personal Preference Kit (essentially just a small number of personal items) and the seeds were otherwise innocuous, NASA officials gave the idea their blessing and Roosa agreed to take them along for the ride. In the end, the seeds orbited the Moon 34 times in the command module Kitty Hawk at the same time Shepard was on the lunar surface taking chip shots with a couple of his personal items- golf balls.
On February 9, 1971, Apollo 14 splashed down in the South Pacific Ocean with neither the drama nor danger of Apollo 13. Unfortunately, during the decontamination process…
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