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Forget the National Christmas Tree; Road-trip to Visit NASA's Moon Trees

December 7, 2012 at 7:20 PM | by | Comments (0)

If you’re more bah humbug than ho, ho, ho, there are trees out there for you too: Moon Trees. These trees, located all over the U.S., don’t have sparkly lights or flashy ornaments but they have been to the moon.

Back in the 1971 Stuart Roosa brought along close to 500 seeds from five tree species on the Apollo 14 mission as part of an experiment. As Apollo 14 re-entered Earth's atmosphere the container carrying the seeds opened and the seeds all mixed together.

NASA thought the seeds wouldn't be viable, but they were wrong and more thank 450 seedlings came from the spacy seeds. And today, the 80 surviving trees have become major tourist attractions for geeks around the world.

California has the most moon trees with 7 planted around the state. The trees can also be found in Florida, Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Washington.

If a road trip to a Moon Tree, rather than the National Christmas Tree, sounds good to you, there is a complete list of all the trees and their locations at nasa.gov.

[Photo: Heather Archuletta]

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