Since 1977, a stately sycamore has greeted visitors to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. It looks like any other sycamore, one tree among many on the quiet, leafy campus in suburban Maryland.

But what many passersby may not realize as they stand under its dappled shade or admire its changing foliage is that this tree came from the moon.

The Goddard sycamore is one of the dozens of so-called “moon trees” scattered around the country, grown from seeds that traveled with astronaut Stuart Roosa on the Apollo 14 mission in 1971. Roosa was the command module pilot, which means that he remained in lunar orbit while commander Alan Shephard and lunar module pilot Edgar Mitchell visited the surface