The Surprising Reason NASA Sends Snoopy Into Space

With every space mission, Snoopy is along for the ride. When he returns, he goes to someone who helped to make the mission possible.

From Aleteia

By Cerith Gardiner

For nearly 60 years, Snoopy has had a rather unexpected job with NASA, which involves donning a spacesuit.

There are certain perks to being an astronaut. You get to leave Earth, wonder at the beauty of God's Creation from afar, and if you're very lucky, become part of history.

But every astronaut who makes that journey has an enormous number of support people staying behind. They are the engineers, technicians, inspectors, flight controllers and many others responsible for thousands of details that most of us will never hear about. And since 1968, NASA has had an adorable way of making sure some of them know their work has been noticed.

They get a Snoopy. Admittedly, not just any Snoopy, but a small sterling-silver pin showing Charlie Brown's famous beagle in a spacesuit that becomes a Silver Snoopy Award. In fact, Charles Schulz himself helped NASA create the astronaut Snoopy in the 1960s, allowing the agency to use his character without charge. But here's the little detail that makes the award particularly special: the pin has already had a trip to space.

When a crew is about to blast off to space, NASA ensures they have all the essentials, including the Silver Snoopy pins that are taking part in their special mission. Once the much-loved character returns to Earth, it is presented personally by an astronaut to someone whose work has made an outstanding contribution to flight safety or mission success.

It's important to note that NASA doesn't hand them out liberally. No more than 1% of the eligible workforce can receive a Silver Snoopy in a year, and recipients must meet at least two of the award's criteria to receive the pin and a certificate identifying the mission on which it flew.

Astronaut Barry Wilmore summed up the thinking behind it rather nicely when presenting Silver Snoopy awards to four NASA Langley employees, sharing:

“We get there on the shoulders of people like you.”

And that applies well beyond NASA. Think of the person who gets up at some ridiculous hour to clean an office before everybody else arrives. By the time the rest of us waltz in with our coffee, the bins have been emptied, the floors are clean and everything is ready for the day. Most of us probably don't give a moment's thought to who did it, or even know who did it.

The same is true in so many areas of life. We notice the person on the stage, but not necessarily the person who got there hours earlier to set it up. We praise the surgeon, while a whole team has made sure the operating room is ready. And we certainly know the names of the astronauts, while thousands of people on the ground have spent years making sure they can go into space and, more importantly, come home again.

And maybe this is where the Silver Snoopy has a particularly Catholic feel to it. Christianity places enormous value on service, including the kind that is carried out quietly, when nobody is watching and there's no applause at the end of it. In fact, Christ spent rather a lot of time pointing our attention toward people whom everyone else had overlooked.

NASA's way of doing that happens to involve a cartoon beagle in a spacesuit. Better still, the astronaut who has been quite literally propelled into the heavens comes back down to Earth and presents that little space-traveling Snoopy to someone who helped put them there. Which is a pretty great way of saying, “I know what you did. And it mattered.”