Moon Trees

On January 31, 1971, Apollo 14 blasted off. Only Shepard and Mitchell actually walked on the Moon. On Feb. 5th they landed the lunar module Antares in Fra Mauro - a hilly area where Shepard famously launched his golf balls using a geology tool as a makeshift driver. Roosa remained in orbit as pilot of the mission's command module Kitty Hawk. Inside his PPK was a metal cylinder, 6 inches long and 3 inches wide, filled with seeds. Together they circled the Moon 34 times.

Apollo 14 was a success. Scientists were delighted with the mission's geology experiments and they were eager to study the 43 kg of Moon rocks collected by Shepard and Mitchell. Krugman was just as eager to study the seeds.

"We had a bit of a scare," Krugman recalls. During decontamination procedures, the seed canister was exposed to vacuum and it burst. The seeds were scattered and traumatized. "We weren't sure if they were still viable," he says. Working by hand, Krugman carefully separated the seeds by species and sent them to Forest Service labs in Mississippi and California. Despite the accident, nearly all of them germinated. "We had [hundreds of] seedlings that had been to the Moon!" Thirty-one years later, Krugman still sounds excited.

During the years that followed, the trees thrived as scientists watched. "The trees grew normally," he continued. "They reproduced with Earth trees and their offspring, called half-Moon trees, were normal, too." (He notes, however, that DNA analysis wasn't routinely done in the early '70's, and so the Moon trees weren't tested in that way. There might be subtle differences yet to be discovered.)

A Moon tree at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre.

Finally, in 1975, they were ready to leave the lab. "That's when things got out of hand," he says.

Everyone wanted a Moon tree. In 1975 and '76, trees were sent to the White House, to Independence Square in Philadelphia, to Valley Forge. "One tree went to the Emperor of Japan. Senators wanted trees to dedicate buildings. We even did some plantings in New Orleans because the mayor there, Mayor Moon, wanted some," says Krugman. There were so many requests that "we had to produce additional seedlings from rooted cuttings of the original trees."

No one kept systematic records, notes Dave Williams. That's why the whereabouts of the trees today are mostly unknown.