Update (April 22, 2021): Since we first wrote about the moon trees, interest in these amazing living remains of the Apollo era has been renewed. The Royal Astronomical Society and the UK Space Agency have now started searching for these trees across Britain.
According to a recent BBC Radio 4 program, around 15 of these trees have been planted in the UK. However, no reports of how the seeds arrived in the country are to be found anywhere.
“Space has a great way of inspiring people. We saw the excitement when trees from the seeds of Newton’s apple tree were planted on our land,” said Libby Jackson of the UK Space Agency.
“I would be interested to know if any of the Moon seeds came to the UK and what became of them.”
To learn more about the moon trees, you can read our original article below.
Original (12 July 2019): On January 31, 1971, the Apollo 14 mission was launched from Earth and spent nine days in space. Along with the necessary space equipment, scientific equipment and two golf balls, the Kitty Hawk Assignment module also contains 500 seeds.
You may be surprised to know that these seeds survive today, despite lasting space radiation, and an accident with disinfection.
In the 1970s, people took all sorts of things to the moon, and the then head of the U.S. Forest Service contacted astronaut Stuart Roosa to suggest sending something small but powerful into space: tree seeds.
Long before Roosa became an astronaut, he began his military career as a ‘smokejumper’ – a specially trained firefighter who parachutes and fights wildfires in a remote area. Roosa wanted to pay tribute to the Forest Service and agreed to the request.
In Roosa’s personal travel package, when the rocket took off, he packed about 500 lobbolly pine seeds (Pinus taeda), American plane tree (Platanus occidentalis), Douglasspar (Pseudotsuga menziesii) and American sweet gum (Liquidambar styraciflua) trees.
Since Roosa was the Command Module Pilot, he never made it to the lunar surface, nor the seeds, but 34 orbits of the moon before they went home.
After the three astronauts returned to Earth, the seeds (inside their container) underwent the normal disinfection procedure, but the container burst and the seeds were mixed together. At the time, it was thought that they might be too damaged to germinate.
Fortunately, researchers tried it anyway and found that most of the seeds did survive and were planted in different places in the US. There may even be one near you.
You can see a list of the ‘Moon Tree’ places here (they are also mapped here), and they seem to have grown completely normal, with no noticeable differences compared to their terrestrial counterparts.
But this raises an interesting question: were the seeds actually different after their journey to space?
We now know that cosmic radiation – the high energy particles we are normally protected by the atmosphere of our planet – is a real problem in space.
The astronauts on the Apollo missions have been exposed to a number of different types of radiation, and so have the seeds.
But it is known that seeds are extremely hardy – some seeds can in fact undergo 200 times the radiation dose needed to kill a person and still germinate.
There is also the issue of a lack of gravity, and how it would affect the seeds in space, but most research done on plants in microgravity is done on the plants themselves, not on the seeds.
All in all, the seeds are unlikely to have changed much due to their short time in space, but it is surprising that they made it completely in space, and even better that many of the trees still grow and flourish today.
In a fitting tribute to Roosa – after his death in 1994 – a lunar tree was planted near his grave.