Episode 69: The Apollo Program, Part XIV

It was a long time coming - ten years in fact! - but after being grounded due to an inner ear problem, Alan Shepard (center) recovered from a painful surgery and was given command of the Apollo 14 mission.

Before I talk about Apollo 14, here is the promised Apollo 13 photo I mentioned with the crew needing something more formal that ball caps and flight suits to meet with the president so they put on ascots!

After stepping on the moon, Shepard remarked that it had been a long but he had made it. He also quipped that it wasn't bad for an old man. At 47, he was the oldest of all the astronauts to walk on the moon.

It didn't work as well as NASA had hoped, but Apollo 14 went to the moon with what was basically a handcart (seen above with Shepard) to help the crew haul equipment around the lunar surface. Carrying experiments made the already taxing moonwalks even harder but the undulating surface wasn't really made for a cart. The next mission would have an all-terrain rover.

Alan Shepard and Ed Mitchell spent a lot of time during their second EVA trying to find a particular point to collect rock and soil samples from but the terrain features on the lunar surface look different from the maps they had, made from pictures taken in orbit. Above, Ed Mitchell is looking at one of those maps trying to navigate.

One of the largest moon rocks brought back by any Apollo mission was Apollo 14's Big Bertha which turned out to be ejecta from Earth and more than four billion years old, making it among the oldest known rocks in the universe.

 

The most enduring image of the Apollo 14 mission is probably when Shepard pulled out a makeshift six iron and took swings at two golf balls.

The insignia for this mission depicts the Earth, the moon, and an astronaut pin drawn with a comet tail. The pin is worn by military astronauts on their uniforms to indicate their military occupation. The design is based on a sketch made by Shepard who had been the head of the astronaut office while he was gounded and meant for the pin to symbolize that through him, the entire astronaut corps was flying ot the moon.

Before his Air Force and astronaut career, Apollo 14 command module pilot Stu Roosa was a forest service smoke jumper and firefighter. During the mission, he brought hundreds of tree seeds into space. After the mission, these seeds were germinated and distributed around the US (and to a few international sites) to see if the zero gravity and radiation of space would effect how their growth. By in large, it did not. 

By the mid-1990s, the story behing the moon trees and their locations had mostly been forgotten until a third grade teacher and her class came across a tree in Indiana with a plaque on it and wrote to NASA aking for more inforamtion . That inspired a NASA researcher to begin searching for moon trees and tracking their location. Several of them had plaques accociated with them, like the plaque above from a  Georgia moon tree and others were tracked via newpaper articles at the time of their plantings. The wonderfully 1990s website is still available today.

I just learned that I grew up near a moon tree located at Lowell Elementary School in Boise, ID.

In 2005, on the 34th anniversary of Apollo 14's splashdown, a half-moon tree (a tree produced from the seed of a moon tree) was planted at Arlington Naitonal Cemetery, not far from Stu Roosa's final resting place.

Air Force Colonel Stuart Allen Roosa passed away on December 12, 1994 from complications due to pancreatitis at the age of 61. He was bured at Arlington National Cemetery in Section 7A, Grave 73.