It’s Apollo, Charlie Brown!
The space program—and perhaps the country as a whole—has had a longstanding love for the Peanuts comic strip. And the cartoonist, Charles Schulz, certainly loved being involved with the space program.
Perhaps the biggest connection between the Peanuts gang and the space program came with Apollo 10. The command module was named Charlie Brown, and the lunar module, Snoopy. During this flight, the camera to be used in the first-ever live color TV broadcast from space was tested on paintings of Charlie Brown and Snoopy. This took place about 128,000 miles from earth.
And when, in lunar orbit, the command module and LM performed a rendezvous, astronaut Stafford noted: “Snoopy and Charlie Brown are hugging each other.”
The Charles M. Schulz Museum has scheduled an exhibit on NASA and Peanuts for January 2009.
