Creator1

We recently have been blasted with videos and images of Katy Perry not bursting into a firework while barely leaving the atmosphere and transporting a dead flower. It reminds me of a phrase we used to say in the Navy, ‘pssh, that ain’t shit!’ That’s correct, plants in space is old news, but it doesn’t mean it’s not fascinating and impressive still!

On January 31^st 1971, astronaut and former Forest Service firefight and Air Force test pilot Stuart Roosa was on the Apollo 14 mission with Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell. Roosa had maintained close contact with his former counterparts at the Forest Service when he was selected as one of nineteen in astronaut class of 1966.

Before his trip on the Apollo 14 mission, he worked as support crew for the Apollo 9 mission. It was between these missions that he and Stan Krugman (still at the Forest Service) began a project to bring tree seeds into space. Krugman found the species of trees to take up and gathered the seeds. There were over 2,000 seeds that represented 5 species of tree that Roosa carried up to space and orbited the moon. They took up sycamore, loblolly pine, redwood, sweet gum, and Douglas Fir, they counterparts, the control seeds remained on Earth. Some seeds were kept in a metal container and a select few were kept in a small canvas patch that opened and exposed the seeds to a vacuum. It was thought that after their trip to space and the exposure to the vacuum, that the seeds would be unusable.

Stan Krugman collected a small sample of the seeds that had been exposed and had some minor success with germination of the seedlings to everyone’s surprise. The trees would unfortunately die due to lack of facilities to properly care for the trees and monitor their health, or because they were exposed to space. With some immediate success, it provided some question to the idea that the vacuum exposure killed the seeds.

Krugman would wait over a year before sending some of the seeds to the Forest Service in Mississippi and California. The seedlings were vastly successful, some were planted next to their earth bound counterparts, although over 50 years later there are no noticeable differences. They were planted in state capitals, NASA buildings, national parks, girl scout camps, Washington Square in Philly, in the International Forest of Friendship. They have been presented as gifts to other countries and the Emperor of Japan.

Stuart Roosa would continue his service to the United States, serving again as a backup module pilot for the Apollo 16 and 17 missions. After this he would continue his interstellar work in the Space Shuttle program until retiring in 1976 with the rank of Colonel in the United States Air Force. Emblematic to his contributions and by complete coincidence, the year he retired, was the year many of his trees from the Apollo 14 mission would be planted. He died in December 1994, the moon trees (one I visited still standing tall) are living monuments to the achievements of Roosa, which don’t need to bare his name to lend significance.