What Are the Moon Trees, and Where Are They Growing Today?

What Are the Moon Trees?

Moon Trees are living trees grown from seeds that traveled to lunar orbit and back aboard Apollo 14 in February 1971. About 500 seeds from five species — loblolly pine, sycamore, sweetgum, redwood, and Douglas fir — were carried by astronaut Stuart Roosa and later planted across the United States, mostly with no central tracking system to record where they went.

Stuart Roosa and the Seeds He Carried to the Moon

Stuart Roosa was the command module pilot on Apollo 14, orbiting the Moon while crewmates Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell walked on the surface below. Before NASA recruited him as an astronaut, Roosa had worked as a U.S. Forest Service smokejumper — someone who parachutes into remote wilderness to fight wildfires. That unusual background made him the natural partner for a quiet experiment the Forest Service wanted to run.

The idea was straightforward: tuck hundreds of tree seeds into a small canister inside Roosa’s personal kit, expose them to deep space — vacuum, radiation, microgravity — and see whether any of that changed how the trees grew when they returned to Earth.

What Did Space Travel Do to the Seeds?

Nothing detectable. When scientists germinated the Moon seeds and compared the resulting trees to control trees grown from seeds that had never left Earth, the two groups were indistinguishable. Same growth rate, same health, same appearance. Deep space left no measurable mark on the seeds whatsoever. The experiment’s most striking finding was essentially a non-finding: trees are trees, even after orbiting the Moon.

How Were the Moon Trees Planted — and Then Lost?

After returning to Earth and being germinated by the Forest Service, the seedlings were distributed to schools, state capitals, parks, and public spaces across the country. Most of the planting happened during the 1976 U.S. Bicentennial celebrations, where the trees served as living commemorations of the Apollo program.

The problem was record-keeping — or the near-total absence of it. NASA and the Forest Service never maintained a centralized registry of where each tree went. Recipients weren’t always told what they had. Plaques were lost or never installed. Over time, hundreds of living monuments to one of history’s most ambitious space programs simply faded from institutional memory.

Stuart Roosa died in December 1994, taking much of the firsthand knowledge with him.

How Were They Rediscovered?

In 1996, a NASA scientist named Dave Williams received an email from a third-grade teacher asking about a Moon Tree at her school. Williams realized he had no idea where most of the trees were — and began a years-long effort to track them down, one by one, often through local records, news archives, and tips from the public.

Dozens of the original Moon Trees have been confirmed still standing. Others have been lost to storms, disease, development, or simple neglect. The search continues today.

What Are Half Moon Trees?

Seeds and cuttings taken from the original Moon Trees have been used to grow a second generation, known as Half Moon Trees. These descendants carry the same lineage without having made the journey themselves. Half Moon Trees are still being propagated and planted today — at schools, parks, and memorials — quietly extending the reach of an experiment that began more than fifty years ago on a mission most people remember for other reasons entirely.