![\"Astronaut](\"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/roosa-seed-canister-1971.jpg\")
Animals had made a similar trip earlier, when two Soviet steppe tortoises flew around the Moon in 1968<\/a>. A 2021 NASA history article<\/a> gives the seed flight two goals. One was testing how deep space affected seeds, and the other was publicizing the Forest Service and its smokejumpers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The trouble started on the ground, at the Lunar Receiving Laboratory quarantine facility in Houston. The container split open in a vacuum during decontamination and the seeds intermingled. Krugman worried they might never germinate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A first attempt in Houston did sprout, according to NASA, but those seedlings soon died in inadequate facilities. About a year later, the remaining seeds went to Forest Service stations in Mississippi and California.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gulfport, Mississippi, took the sycamore, loblolly pine and sweetgum. Placerville, California, handled the redwood and Douglas fir. NASA’s Arbor Day account<\/a> says the flown seeds germinated as well as the ground controls and yielded more than 400 saplings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most of the young trees were given away in 1975 and 1976 for the nation’s 200th birthday. President Gerald Ford’s telegram to the ceremonies called each one “a living symbol of our spectacular human and scientific achievements.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Philadelphia’s Washington Square hosted the first official bicentennial planting on May 6, 1975, and Roosa attended. Other saplings went to Brazil and Switzerland, and NASA says one was presented to the Emperor of Japan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some trees went into the ground beside Earth-grown counterparts. After decades of growth, NASA reports “no discernable differences” between the two groups. Without a plaque, a Moon tree looks like any other sycamore or pine.<\/p>\n\n\n Brian Odom, then NASA’s acting chief historian, put it this way in 2021: “it was what the astronauts took with them on their lunar journey that has left such an indelible mark on the landscape back on Earth.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Several of the best-known plantings are already gone. NASA’s list marks 34 U.S. sites as no longer alive, including a loblolly pine planted at the White House in January 1977.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Philadelphia sycamore died in 2008 and came down in 2011. A clone planted there in 2016 was removed three years later. In September 2017, Hurricane Irma took the sycamore at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kennedy later added a garden of 12 second-generation sycamores, one for each crewed Apollo mission. Roosa died in December 1994, and his daughter Rosemary has kept promoting these offspring around the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n NASA repeated the idea on its uncrewed Artemis I mission, flying five species of tree seeds for about four weeks. More than 1,000 organizations applied for the seedlings during an open call in fall 2023.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Artemis I Moon trees have now taken root at 236 locations in the contiguous United States, says a NASA progress report<\/a>. Schools are among the recipients, much as NASA’s space-flown tomato seeds reached 3.3 million students<\/a> in an earlier program.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Classrooms have flown their own ideas too, including a Tennessee student’s honeybees aboard Challenger in 1984<\/a>. The Apollo line also continues. On June 25, 2026, the Artemis II crew dedicated a second-generation loblolly pine at Johnson Space Center in Houston.<\/p>\n\n\n\nA ruptured canister in Houston<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Saplings for the bicentennial<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"Sycamore](\"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/goddard-sycamore-moon-tree.jpg\")
Hurricane Irma and other losses<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Artemis seeds followed in 2022<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Twenty sites nobody can confirm<\/h2>\n\n\n\n