NASA is trying to track down several hundred aging travelers who flew to the moon and back 40 years ago and now live quietly across the United States. It took an e-mail from a third-grade class in Indiana years ago to remind the space agency about these early visitors to outer space.
The agency is still searching for several hundred "moon trees" grown from seeds carried aboard the Apollo 14 command module that orbited the moon in 1971. Part science experiment, part public relations campaign, the idea was to see whether space flight affected their ability to sprout.
Astronaut Stuart Roosa carried a metal canister about the size of a soda can in his personal kit filled with more than 500 seeds from loblolly pine, redwood, sweet gum, sycamore and Douglas fir trees. He did it in part to honor the U.S. Forest Service, where he had served as a smoke jumper, the first responders to forest fires.
After Apollo 14 got back, Stan Krugman of the Forest Service oversaw planting of the moon seeds and an equivalent number of seeds that hadn't been up in orbit to compare their growth vs. the seedlings that came from space. Some 450 of the Apollo seeds sprouted right up.
By 1975, they had grown large enough that they could be transplanted. For the next few years, NASA and the Forest Service shipped the saplings out to be planted in parks and on the grounds of state capitols, schools and government buildings, especially in honor of the nation's bicentennial in 1976.
And then they forgot about them.
NASA's interest in tracking them down now is partly driven by the Apollo mission anniversary, but it's also because some of the tree species are dying off, having lived out a normal lifespan of roughly 40 years.
The trees might have been forgotten completely except that in 1996, Joan Gobel, a third-grade teacher at Cannelton Elementary school in Cannelton, Ind., asked her students to write about local trees. One student raised her hand. "She said, 'You know, there's this tree at camp that has a sign that says it's a moon tree,' " Gobel says.
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