Moon tree Moon tree Moon trees are trees grown from 500 seeds taken into orbit around the Moon by Stuart Roosa during the Apollo 14 mission in 1971. As the Command Module Pilot on the Apollo 14 mission, and as he had been a smoke jumper, Roosa was contacted by Ed Cliff, who was the Chief of the Forest Service at the time, and who proposed the idea of taking the seeds along. Seeds for the experiment were chosen from five different types of trees: loblolly pine, sycamore, sweetgum, redwood, and Douglas fir. The seeds orbited the moon, but were not landed
Lander (spacecraft) Surveyor. The U.S. manned Apollo Lunar Modules (since 1969) with rovers (since 1971) and Soviet unmanned late big landers (since 1969), Lunokhods (since 1970) and sample return missions (since 1970) used a rocket descent engine for a soft landing of astronauts and lunar rovers on the Moon. The Altair spacecraft, previously known as the "Lunar Surface Access Module" or "LSAM", was the planned lander for the Constellation program, prior to the cancellation of Project Constellation. Russia has plans for Luna-Grunt mission to return samples from the Moon by 2021. The Chinese Chang'e 3 mission and its Jade Rabbit rover landed