Silver Snoopy Award
nasa.gov
nasa.gov
I have been on a team that won a silver Snoopy but was a subcontractor and didn't get one myself; just the Boeing employees I worked with did. Every once in a while I Google them on the off chance I could get one as a piece of memoribilia, but they are thousands of dollars.
[1] https://www.chrono24.com/omega/omega-speedmaster-silver-snoo...
https://www.chrono24.com/search/index.htm?dosearch=true&quer...
Aren't they both basically brands owned by the same corporation (The Swatch Group)?
Another question in my head is whether they had to license Snoopy from the estate of Schulz (or whoever holds the rights the Peanuts gang).
ETA that unsnap_biceps just answered my questions.
Though I don't think I will be able to cite an official document stating Al Chop is a Snoopy fan :-), so there's that.
Considering Charles Schulz's retirement, this is an ideal time to get Al Chop to tell how he drafted Snoopy for a special NASA assignment.
...
Chop said he was, at the time, director of the public affairs office for the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. And, like an estimated 355 million other people in 75 countries, he was a fan and avid reader of Schulz's Peanuts comic strip. He especially liked the dog who often assumed a pilot's role atop the doghouse.
"Snoopy was a flier," Chop said. "No reason he couldn't become an astronaut, too."
by Thom Marshall, Houston Chronicle, January 7, 2000
After the completion of the Mercury and Gemini projects, NASA wanted a way to promote greater awareness among its employees and contractors of the impact they had on flight safety, the flight crews and their missions.[4] NASA wanted to use a symbol for spaceflight that would be well known and accepted by the public, similar to the recognition received by the United States Forest Service's Smokey Bear.
The idea for the Silver Snoopy award came from Al Chop, who was director of the public affairs office for the Manned Spacecraft Center (now called the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center). He wanted to create an award featuring Snoopy as an astronaut to be given by astronauts in recognition of outstanding contributions by employees.[5]
Charles M. Schulz, who was an avid supporter of the U.S. space program, welcomed the idea of using Snoopy for the award. Schulz and United Feature Syndicate (the distributor of the Peanuts comic strip) agreed to let NASA use "Snoopy the Astronaut" at no cost.[4] Schulz himself drew the image the award pin was based on. He also drew promotional art for posters to promote the award program.[5]
“ The command module was given the call sign "Charlie Brown" and the lunar module the call sign "Snoopy". These were taken from the characters in the comic strip, Peanuts, Charlie Brown, and Snoopy.These names were chosen by the astronauts with the approval of Charles Schulz, the strip's creator,who was uncertain it was a good idea, since Charlie Brown was always a failure. The choice of names was deemed undignified by some at NASA…”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_10#:~:text=The%20comman...
I find it interesting that "has flown in space" is presented here almost like a property of the material and not as history of the individual pins.
Are the pins passed on from past recipients to new ones, so the time in space was during the previous wearer's mission? Or are there ISS missions that just carry a box of not yet awarded pins with them but will not do anything with the box, just so it gains its flown-in-space-ness?
http://spaceflownartifacts.com/flown_silver_snoopy_awards.ht...
seems like in the apollo era crew carried a few in their PPK (personal preference kit), and in the later shuttle era they regularly carried 500-1000 pins per mission.