The Tree Log

Moon Tree at the Goddard Space Centre   Moon Trees - Sounds like something Enid Blyton might have conjured up for a children's book, right? But it's not the stuff of fairytales, there WERE seeds taken to the moon by astronauts on two of the NASA missions - the Apollo 14 mission of 1971 and the Artemis mission of 2022 (1). The seeds on the Apollo mission were carried by Stuart Roosa who had worked as a smokejumper (2) for the US Forest Service before entering the astronaut programme. A thousand seeds were sent to Roosa by his old boss, the Head of the Forest Service, who was curious to discover whether zero gravity had any effect on resulting seedlings and trees. Roosa took the seeds with him and kept them in the command module as it orbited the moon.