NASA launches search for 'moon trees'

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 announced last week that it 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.

NASA Sycamore grows at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

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.

The class contacted the director at the Girl Scout camp, who remembered that the tree had been "a big deal and it was something to do with NASA," Gobel says. Her class had just gotten online, a rarity in 1996, so they checked out NASA's Apollo website. But there was nothing on the trees.

Where the 'moon trees' grow Astronaut Stuart Roosa carried more than 500 tree seeds with him in the command module of Apollo 14 that orbited the moon in 1971. NASA knows where 79 of the trees were planted: Location No. of living

moon trees Alabama 4 Arizona 2 Arkansas 2 California 8 Florida 6 Idaho 2 Indiana 5 Kansas 1 Louisiana 1 Maryland 2 Massachusetts 1 Mississippi 2 Missouri 1 North Carolina 2 Ohio 1 Oregon 6 Pennsylvania 6 Tennessee 2 Utah 1 Virginia 2 Washington 1 Brazil 1 Source: Dave Williams, a curator at NASA's National Space Science Data Center in Greenbelt, Md.

The students' first e-mail to NASA got a polite response of "Never heard of them," but it was passed on to Dave Williams, a curator at NASA's National Space Science Data Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Williams talked to people from the Apollo mission, but "no one had ever heard of it" either, he says. Finally, NASA's history office tracked down a few newspaper clippings about some moon tree plantings.

"I slowly put the story together enough that I could e-mail Joan back," says Williams, who is still with NASA, "but I thought, 'This was such a neat story and no one knows about it, so I should at least put up a page of what I've got.' "

That was in 1996, and every few months, he would get an e-mail from someone, somewhere, about another moon tree.

As NASA approached the anniversary of the Apollo 14 mission, the agency ramped up efforts to find the rest of the trees. Williams now has accounted for 79 of them.

In the week since the 40th anniversary of Apollo 14's splashdown on Feb. 9, 1971, Williams has gotten a flood of new leads on these voyagers. "I've been getting a ton of e-mails about moon trees. I'm struggling to keep up with it."

There are updates on trees he knows about, photos of plaques, scans of old newspaper articles and news of five or six of the original trees he hadn't known about. "I have to check them out, but it's kind of neat," he says.

Turns out the Cannelton tree was heavily damaged in a major wind storm in September of 2008, but survived, Gobel says. "It's still there. It's just not as tall as it was."

If you know of a moon tree, you can e-mail Williams at dave.williams@nasa.gov.