Author: Jessica Leigh Hester / Source: Atlas Obscura
The Moon is not an easy place to be a living thing.
The little cotton seeds that germinated on the far side of the Moon recently, aboard China’s Chang’e-4 lander, died soon after. The water, oxygen, soil, and heat source inside their cozy biosphere were no match for the Moon’s version of night—two weeks of darkness and temperatures reportedly dipping down to -310 degrees Fahrenheit.That’s not to say it isn’t possible for plants to grow off-world. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station tend and sometimes harvest and eat romaine lettuce, cabbage, and more from carefully calibrated chambers. And while the Chang’e-4 experiment marked the first time that humans have sprouted something on the Moon, our rocky satellite was involved in another case of lunar gardening, in the form of seeds that went to the Moon and were brought back to Earth. Turns out many of those “Moon Trees,” as they are known, have had a bit of a rough go of it.
In 1971, just before he blasted off with Apollo 14, astronaut Stuart Roosa—who had formerly worked as a smokejumper for the U.S. Forest Service—stashed several hundred seeds from redwoods, loblolly pines, sweetgums, sycamores, and firs in his personal kit (the small tube in which crew members can stow sentimental stuff unrelated to the mission). The seeds got little attention at the time, amid the bigger buzz around the mission and the general sense of cautious optimism combined with fear that followed the heroic but troubled experience of the Apollo 13 astronauts.
The seeds spent a total of nine days in space, and when the Apollo 14 crew splashed back to Earth, the seeds did, too, with little fanfare. With the exception of a few internal documents, “I never found anything from the time the mission went up,” says Dave Williams, an archivist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who has become the de facto chronicler of the seeds’ journey. “No one had heard about these even for some time afterwards, until they planted them.”
The U.S. Forest Service watched over the seeds until they sprouted, and once they had grown hardy enough, seedlings were fanned out across the country to be planted. (There may have been a rush to germinate as many of them as possible, as quickly as possible, out of fear that they’d been ruined when the canister holding them popped open during quarantine.) In 1975 and 1976, local papers from Las Vegas, Nevada, to Huntsville, Alabama, reported on astronauts, politicians, and other public figures dropping by to help place the 18-inch sycamores or foot-tall pines into their new homes in parks, squares, and other sites in honor of America’s bicentennial. Some other seedlings were planted a few years on, and in at least one case, when a much-less-photogenic root clipping arrived instead of a seedling, an entirely different tree stood in until the handsomer version of the Moon Tree was ready to be planted later.
There was something heroic in trees grown from seeds that had traveled so far from home. They were cast as a testament to innovation, engineering, and ingenuity—fragile things that Americans had successfully shepherded through a cold, dark trip. The trees were also emblems of what makes Earth stand out in the solar system. They were often planted alongside patriotic plaques that said things like, “America’s Green World of Trees.” The sturdy, iconic species celebrated our lush, leafy existence.
The problem is that once they’d been planted, many people forgot about them—including many people at NASA.
The NASA archivist Williams didn’t know anything about the Moon Trees until the mid-1990s, when he was making early…
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