Stuart Roosa

• 1. Introduction

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  Stuart Allen Roosa orbited the Moon 34 times, alone, while his two crewmates walked on the surface below. No one was watching him through a television camera. No one was broadcasting his name. Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell were getting the headlines on the lunar surface during Apollo 14 in early 1971. But up in the Command Module Kitty Hawk, Roosa was running experiments, keeping the ship alive, and carrying something unusual in his pocket: seeds.

  Those seeds, from loblolly pine, sycamore, sweet gum, redwood, and Douglas fir trees, would eventually be planted across the United States and become known as Moon Trees. That detail hints at something essential about Roosa. Before he was an astronaut, he was a smokejumper, parachuting into active wildfires in Oregon and California. Before that, he was a kid from Claremore, Oklahoma. The arc from forest fires to lunar orbit is the story this documentary will follow.

• 2. Fire and Smoke

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  Claremore, Oklahoma, is where Roosa grew up, attending Justus Tiawah Grade School and then Claremore High School, graduating in 1951. The path from there to the cockpit was not a straight line. Before flight training, Roosa signed on with the U.S. Forest Service as a smokejumper, parachuting into at least four active fires in Oregon and California during the 1953 fire season.

  Smokejumping is one of the more physically demanding jobs in wildland firefighting. You fall toward the smoke, not away from it. That willingness to jump toward danger rather than away from it would prove characteristic of Roosa throughout his career. From the Forest Service, he entered the Aviation Cadet Program at Williams Air Force Base in Arizona, earning his flight training commission. He then flew the F-101 Voodoo at Olmstead Air Force Base in Pennsylvania from July 1962 to August 1964, followed by the F-84F Thunderstreak and the F-100 Super Sabre at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia.

  He graduated with honors from the University of Colorado Boulder in 1960, earning a Bachelor of Science in aeronautical engineering under the U.S. Air Force Institute of Technology Program. After graduation, he served as Chief of Service Engineering at Tachikawa Air Base in Japan for two years. The path continued upward from there to the Aerospace Research Pilot School, Class 64C, and then to experimental test work at Edwards Air Force Base in California, which put him in line for the astronaut selection of 1966.

• 3. The 1966 Class

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  Nineteen people were selected as part of the NASA astronaut class of 1966, and Roosa was one of them. His first assignment in the program placed him at one of its most painful moments. On the 27th of January 1967, Roosa was the Capsule Communicator, or CAPCOM, at the Launch Complex 34 blockhouse when the Apollo 1 fire killed all three crew members inside their spacecraft during a ground test.

  The CAPCOM is the person in mission control whose voice the crew hears. Being present at that moment, holding that role, meant Roosa was part of the worst disaster NASA had experienced. That experience stayed with everyone who worked the program through its recovery. In 1969, Roosa moved forward, joining the astronaut support crew for Apollo 9. Support crew work is often invisible, but it put him in position for what came next.

• 4. Solo in Lunar Orbit

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  Apollo 14 launched on the 31st of January 1971, and returned to Earth on the 9th of February 1971. During the mission, while Shepard and Mitchell spent two days on the lunar surface, Roosa remained in the Command Module Kitty Hawk and conducted an extensive series of experiments from orbit. He spent 33 hours circling the Moon alone, completing 34 orbits in total.

  Being the Command Module Pilot on a lunar landing mission carried a particular solitude. There was no second person in the orbiting spacecraft. Communications with Earth were limited by the geometry of orbit. When the Command Module passed behind the Moon, Roosa was entirely cut off. He logged 217 hours in space across the mission. By the end of his career he had also accumulated 5,500 hours of total flying time, with 5,000 of those hours in jet aircraft.

  As part of a joint project between NASA and the U.S. Forest Service, Roosa carried seeds from five tree species on the mission: loblolly pine, sycamore, sweet gum, redwood, and Douglas fir. After the mission, those seeds were germinated and planted at locations across the United States. They became known as the Moon Trees, a living connection between his smokejumping past and his time in orbit.

• 5. After the Moon

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  Roosa served as backup Command Module Pilot for both Apollo 16 and Apollo 17. The crew rotation patterns used by NASA at the time suggested he would likely have commanded one of the final Apollo missions had those missions not been cancelled. He was assigned to the Space Shuttle program before retiring from the Air Force in 1976 at the rank of colonel.

  In 1973, Roosa attended Harvard Business School's six-week Advanced Management Program. He carried that into a second career, holding positions in international and U.S. businesses. In 1981, he founded Gulf Coast Coors and served as its president until his death. He also received a number of decorations during and after his NASA career, including the NASA Distinguished Service Medal, the Air Force Distinguished Service Medal, the MSC Superior Achievement Award in 1970, and the Arnold Air Society's John F. Kennedy Award in 1971. The City of New York awarded him its Gold Medal in 1971 as well.

  Roosa was inducted into the Oklahoma Aviation and Space Hall of Fame in 1980 as one of five Oklahoman astronauts honored that year. He entered the International Space Hall of Fame in 1983. An elementary school in his hometown of Claremore, Oklahoma, carries his name.

• 6. Legacy and Memory

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  Roosa died on the 12th of December 1994, in Washington, D.C., from complications of pancreatitis, at age 61. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. His wife Joan died on the 30th of October 2007, in Gulfport, Mississippi, and was interred there alongside him.

  Posthumously, in 1997, Roosa was inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame. In 1998, George Newbern portrayed him in the HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon. A biography, Smoke Jumper, Moon Pilot by Willie G. Moseley, was published in 2011.

  The Moon Trees remain the most tangible trace of Roosa's mission for most people who encounter them. They grew from seeds that traveled to the Moon and back, germinated in soil that had never left Earth, and now stand in parks and public spaces across the country. For a man who began his career jumping toward wildfires, planting trees, in a sense, was always part of the story.