Stuart Rousa is in space.

Specifically, Stuart Rousa is floating above the moon.

He's in a little wedge-shaped space command module, looking through its porthole window.

It's February 1971, the Apollo 14 mission.

Stuart Rousa is photographing sites for future moon landings.

He's doing experiments.

And he's carrying some unusual and precious cargo.

Every astronaut on this mission is allowed to bring one canvas bag filled with personal items.

A lot of them brought coins or other souvenirs that they could give away.

They brought things like photographs that they left on the moon.

But inside Rousa's bag, brought all the way from Earth, was a small metal container.

Stuart Rousa took, in his personal kit, hundreds of tree seeds.

Tree seeds, seeds from sycamores, Douglas firs, redwoods, sweetgums.

And Stuart Rousa had a plan for these seeds.

I'm Amanda McGowan and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

And today, we are tracking down what happened to Stuart Rousa's seeds, the story of the moon trees after this.

It's 1996, 25 years have gone by since Stuart Rousa brought those seeds up into space.

And in the small town of Canelton, Indiana, a third grade class is doing a project, a project on local trees.

One of the girls in the class was at the Girl Scout Camp in Canelton.

And there was a tree there and it had a sign on it, it just said moon tree.

And so she asked in the class, I guess, you know, well, what about this tree that says moon tree, what is this?

And so they checked it out and really the camp didn't know much about it, except it had something to do with the Apollo.

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