The Moon Trees That Flew To The Moon On Apollo 14

Video from the channel Scott Manley about Apollo 14, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 12:34. Language: English. Video type: Documentary.

Scott Manley tells the story of the so-called Moon Trees: tree seeds that Stuart Roosa carried on Apollo 14 and that, once back on Earth, were planted across the United States. The author visits one of these trees, a coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens), and reviews what the radiation of the trip might have done to them.

Apollo 14, crewed by Alan Shepard, Edgar Mitchell and Stuart Roosa, aimed to put the program back on track after Apollo 13. Roosa, a former wildland firefighting smokejumper, carried the seed container in collaboration with the US Forest Service, partly as an experiment and partly as a symbol. The seeds stayed with him in lunar orbit while his crewmates were on the surface. The container broke and the seeds got mixed up, which prevented the detailed analysis that had been planned; the Forest Service planted them at its research stations and found that the trees grew normally.

The trees were later given out to anyone who requested one: there are specimens at Berkeley, at Humboldt State University in Arcata, and in Monterey, and one planted at the White House died. No one kept track of where they went, and decades later NASA's David Williams began tracking them down: a few dozen of the roughly four hundred planted are known today. According to the expert consulted, the seeds, dry and protected by their coating, are not very sensitive to radiation, and the trip probably had no consequences. Second- and third-generation Moon Trees already exist. The video also includes a shout-out to the Team Trees reforestation charity campaign.