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
Third-party evidence for Apollo Moon landings was unknown for nearly 40 years but it was rediscovered in 2010 in photographs by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and its retroreflector is now in use. Both the United States and the USSR had the capability to soft-land objects on the surface of the Moon for several years before that. The USSR successfully landed its first unmanned probe (Luna 9) on the Moon in February 1966, and the United States followed with Surveyor 1 in June 1966, but no unmanned landers carried retroreflectors before Lunokhod 1 in November 1970. Post-Apollo lunar exploration missions have located and imaged artifacts of