Past Exhibitions ● 2009

To the Moon: Snoopy Soars with NASA

January 31 through July 20, 2009
It is difficult to imagine—although some remember it well—the excitement that the race for the moon invoked forty years ago.  As the decade of the 1960s was coming to a close, America and the rest of the world waited with great anticipation to see if NASA could achieve President John F. Kennedy’s challenge, put forth in May 1961, of putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade.  Consequently, it was a very great honor, indeed, when the crew of Apollo 10 chose to nickname their command and lunar modules “Charlie Brown” and “Snoopy,” respectively.  The May 1969 flight of Apollo 10 was the “dress rehearsal” for the lunar landing that was scheduled for July 1969.  Astronauts Thomas Stafford and Eugene Cernan piloted “Snoopy” within 50,000 feet of the lunar surface as they scouted the landing area for Apollo 11 while John Young orbited the moon in the command module “Charlie Brown.”

To the Moon took a look at the history of Apollo 10 and the Peanuts characters’ role in that flight and in the NASA Manned Flight Awareness safety program.  It featured a one-third scale model of the Apollo command module from the Johnson Space Center, an Apollo-era flight suit, the actual image of Charlie Brown that flew aboard Apollo 10, and a special children’s area for creative play.