Even if humanity never returns to the Moon, veterans of the
lunar missions will still be around for hundreds, maybe even
thousands of years. That's because the Apollo 14 astronaut
Stuart Roosa brought hundreds of seeds with him to the Moon, and
many of these were later planted to create the so-called Moon
trees. The only problem? No one is exactly sure where they are
anymore. Roosa and the seeds never actually stepped foot on the
Moon - they stayed up in the command module and made thirty-four
orbits of the Moon while fellow astronauts Alan Shepard and
Edgar Mitchell headed down to the surface. Roosa's background
was a smokejumper, a firefighter who parachutes into the middle
of wildfires to put out the inferno from within. As such, he had
a fondness for trees, and was easily persuaded to take the seeds
with him. The seeds included those for redwood, loblolly pine,
sycamore, Douglas fir, and sweetgum trees, and all these various
types were planted once Roosa and his fellow astronauts returned
from the Moon in