The Moon Tree sweetgum sits near the pavilion, safely surrounded by two fences.
There’s a small, fenced enclosure a stone’s throw from NCI Frederick’s pavilion, just across the street from Building 538.
Drawing near to it, you’d see two layers of fence encircling a sapling. If you’re botanically inclined, you might recognize the sharp, five-lobed leaves marking the tree as a Liquidambar styraciflua, a sweetgum—a common species in Maryland. You could be forgiven, then, if you’d think the fences are overkill.
Yet this sweetgum is particularly worth protecting. It’s a Moon Tree.
In November 2022, the sapling was still a seed, one of many that were launched toward the moon on NASA’s Orion spacecraft as part of the uncrewed Artemis I mission. Orion hurtled through space for nine days before entering lunar orbit. There it—and the seeds—stayed for six days before starting the return journey to Earth.
The craft reentered Earth’s atmosphere at Mach 32 (over 24,000 miles per hour), blazed through the skies, slowed, and splashed into the Pacific off the coast of Baja California. After a 25-day, 1.4-million-mile trip around the moon, both Orion and the seeds were home.
NCI Frederick is one of a small number of organizations that call themselves the home of a Moon Tree. The sweetgum sapling arrived on campus and was planted in late October, thanks to the Campus Improvement Committee (CIC), Facilities Maintenance and Engineering (FME), and Ruppert Landscape.
“I had no idea if we would get one, but I had high hopes for everything we could do with it,” CIC member Helene Highbarger said via email.
Federal agencies, educational institutions, and museums can apply to receive a Moon Tree via NASA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service. (The Forest Service helps to cultivate and distribute the saplings.) The accepted applicants, including NCI Frederick, must use the tree to connect with their communities and foster science education.
That’s just what the CIC has in mind, said Adam Leaman, the CIC’s functional chair. While the committee anticipates the Moon Tree will become a conversation piece on campus, the real goal is to create educational opportunities and boost morale.
The CIC is investigating ways to involve the tree in Take Your Child to Work Day and other on-campus events. Eventually, an informational plaque will be installed.
The CIC is an employee- and contractor-run volunteer organization that enhances the campus infrastructure with functional and aesthetic modifications. Its past accomplishments include the construction of the pavilion and the tending and replanting of progeny saplings of the famed Wye Oak.
Team Makes ‘Way Cool’ Idea Happen
Highbarger brought the Moon Tree initiative to the CIC’s attention in 2023. Mike Addington, the then-head of the committee “agreed it would be ‘way cool’ to have a Moon Tree on campus,” Highbarger said.
NCI Frederick’s Office of Scientific Operations then helped the CIC submit the application, and the team learned this summer that the tree would be delivered sometime within the next year and a half.
It’d arrive much sooner than that. Barely six weeks after learning they’d been approved, the CIC was notified the sweetgum had been shipped. The situation was as daunting as it was exciting. There was still so much to prepare.
“I was very anxious to make the arrangements. How many organizations can say they have a tree grown from a seed that flew around the moon?” Leaman recalled.
CIC members and staff across campus hustled for two and a half weeks in October to get ready and get the sweetgum in the ground. FME’s Tom Tousignaut worked with Ruppert Landscape, NCI Frederick’s landscaping contractor, to select a suitable site for the tree. Chris Furbay, Woodrow Smith, and Dwayne Atherton, all also staff in FME, helped plant the sapling and built two fences around it, specified by NASA and the Forest Service, to keep wildlife from damaging it.
More Information to Come
With the sweetgum planted and protected, the CIC aims to ramp up the science education component in 2025, Highbarger said.
There’s a plethora of history and information to draw on. NASA established the first Moon Tree initiative after the 1971 Apollo 14 mission, when astronaut and former Forest Service employee Stuart Roosa brought seeds into lunar orbit aboard the Kitty Hawk command module. Upon the mission’s return to Earth, the Forest Service grew the seeds into saplings that were distributed to recipients worldwide.
Today’s Moon Tree initiative is a nod to that history. According to NASA, it’s “a celebration of the future of space exploration with NASA’s Artemis Program,” which aims to land humans on the moon in a repeat of the Apollo Program landings during the 1960s and 1970s. Six species of tree, each native to different parts of the U.S., are available through the program.
For Leaman, NCI Frederick’s Moon Tree is especially meaningful, since his father was a NASA employee who worked on the Apollo Program and the Skylab project. As he fondly reflects on his family’s connections, he hopes the tree will be a source of meaning and inspiration for others for years to come.
“I’m very happy that it’s there,” Leaman said. “It’s something that’ll be there after we’re gone.”
Samuel Lopez leads the editorial team in Scientific Publications, Graphics & Media (SPGM). He writes for newsletters; informally serves as an institutional historian; and edits scientific manuscripts, corporate documents, and sundry other written media. SPGM is the creative services department and hub for editing, illustration, graphic design, formatting, multimedia, and training in these areas.
