![]() ![]() With the exception of a few internal documents, “I never found anything from the time the mission went up,” says Dave Williams, an archivist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who has become the de facto chronicler of the seeds’ journey. ![]() ![]() The seeds spent a total of nine days in space, and when the Apollo 14 crew splashed back to Earth, the seeds did, too, with little fanfare. The seeds got little attention at the time, amid the bigger buzz around the mission and the general sense of cautious optimism combined with fear that followed the heroic but troubled experience of the Apollo 13 astronauts. Forest Service-stashed several hundred seeds from redwoods, loblolly pines, sweetgums, sycamores, and firs in his personal kit (the small tube in which crew members can stow sentimental stuff unrelated to the mission). In 1971, just before he blasted off with Apollo 14, astronaut Stuart Roosa-who had formerly worked as a smokejumper for the U.S. Turns out many of those “Moon Trees,” as they are known, have had a bit of a rough go of it. And while the Chang’e-4 experiment marked the first time that humans have sprouted something on the Moon, our rocky satellite was involved in another case of lunar gardening, in the form of seeds that went to the Moon and were brought back to Earth. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station tend and sometimes harvest and eat romaine lettuce, cabbage, and more from carefully calibrated chambers. That’s not to say it isn’t possible for plants to grow off-world. The water, oxygen, soil, and heat source inside their cozy biosphere were no match for the Moon’s version of night-two weeks of darkness and temperatures reportedly dipping down to -310 degrees Fahrenheit. The little cotton seeds that germinated on the far side of the Moon recently, aboard China’s Chang’e-4 lander, died soon after. The Moon is not an easy place to be a living thing. ![]()
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