Fly Me To The Moon Trees

One of the many problems facing developers of new housing developments these days, as always, is choosing names for all these new streets. Over the years, they have trended to

• English-sounding names like Coventry Wy and Duke of Windsor Court
• Names from nature such as Oak Tree Rd, River Wy and so forth
• Names of the developer's children or grandchildren - e.g. Valerie Ann Avenue or Mable Jean Drive

So here I am, always a friend to commerce, with an idea for a new street name:

Moon Tree Place

I almost forgot about this, it happened so long ago, but NASA's trips to the moon were about a whole lot more than planting the flag and hitting golf balls! In the Apollo 14 mission, as Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell roamed the lunar surface, the third astronaut, Stuart Roosa, hovered above the moon in the command module, with hundreds of tree seeds packed along with a change of socks and underwear.

Roosa started off with 500 seeds for different tree species, with the same amount left behind for control purposes, but someone didn't close the Tupperware firmly enough, and some of the space seeds were contaminated. But, the remainder took 34 loops around the moon and came home to be planted all around the world.

NASA calls them “Moon Trees,” and about 83 of them are still alive - all but three in the US (two in South America and one in Europe).  Among them, you'll find redwoods, Douglas firs, sycamores, sweet gums, and loblolly pines.

Below, see a sycamore planted in 1975 at Mississippi State University. You see those little green men in the tree, don't you? DON'T YOU???

Some years ago, ex-astronaut David Williams set out to take a census of the trees. He began with a list of 22 Moon Trees, wound up finding 80, but also found that 21 died. He believes that they died of natural earthly causes that had nothing to do with their time in the lunar atmosphere. 

I would like to set forth the notion that it's obvious that many people walking around breathing earth air today have spent time on the moon. For further details, just look at any local or national news broadcast.