U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Arizona) helped Flagstaff’s Lowell Observatory dedicate a so-called moon tree on May 5.
Moon trees are descendants of the seeds astronaut Stuart Roosa brought with him on Apollo 14 in the 1970s. Roosa, a former U.S. Forest Service smokejumper, brought hundreds of seeds with him on the voyage.
Afterwards, the Forest Service germinated the seeds, one of which grew near Mississippi State University. Rosemary Roosa, Stuart’s daughter, joined Kelly and others in paying homage to a young American sycamore related to that tree that was dedicated at the observatory.
Kelly, a former NASA astronaut himself, says the moon tree reminds him of Roosa and some of the first people in space, like Alan Shepard, the first American to go to space.
“I never met Stuart Roosa, but I did meet Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell [another Apollo 14 astronaut], and those are the guys that I looked up to as a kid and that inspired me at a very young age,” Kelly told KNAU after the leafy lunar celebration.
After the recent Artemis II voyage to the moon, Kelly says he hopes Americans will be inspired to go back.
The first person to travel to Mars might even be from Flagstaff, Kelly says.
“They might even be sitting over there,” he says. “That's the power of exploration.”
To preserve that explorative power, he plans to fight the White House’s proposed 23% budget cut to NASA in the upcoming congressional appropriations process.
“The president’s request for NASA is inadequate,” Kelly says. “It would be a drastic cut in science especially. And that scientific research leads to innovations that only our country is able to do that then leads to the building of industry and creating of jobs.”
President Donald Trump “won’t get the final say,” according to Kelly.
