Snoopy The NASA Mascot

Snoopy joined NASA in 1968, as a mascot for the Manned Flight Awareness program (now called the Space Flight Awareness program), which was established in 1963. It wasn’t long before Snoopy made his first spaceflight. In 1968, astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders took Silver Snoopy lapel pins with them on Apollo 8, the first crewed mission to leave Earth’s orbit and the first crewed mission to enter lunar orbit. The tradition has continued over the years. “Snoopy has been to space quite a few times,” says O’Brien. “He was on Columbia STS-32 in 1990 and the space station in 2019 for the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon.”