If you had to guess NASA’s most prestigious internal award, “a sterling silver pin of Snoopy in a spacesuit” probably wouldn’t be your first answer. But that’s exactly what the Silver Snoopy Award is — and it’s genuinely one of the coolest pieces of space history you’ve probably never heard of.
Why NASA needed Snoopy in the first place
Rewind to the late 1960s. NASA had just wrapped up the Mercury and Gemini programmes and was gearing up for Apollo — the missions that would eventually land humans on the Moon. Behind every astronaut, though, were thousands of engineers, technicians and contractors doing unglamorous, high-stakes work: the people making sure O-rings sealed properly and wiring didn’t short out.
NASA wanted these people to feel the weight of what they were doing, since even a tiny oversight could cost lives — a fear made painfully real by the Apollo 1 fire in January 1967, which killed all three crew members during a launch pad test.
So NASA’s public affairs office, led by a man named Al Chop, had an idea: what if there was a friendly, universally recognisable mascot who could represent flight safety, similar to how Singa the Kindness Lion promoted courtesy?
The 1960s just happened to be peak Peanuts fever: A Charlie Brown Christmas had just aired, and Snoopy was arguably the most beloved cartoon character in America. Chop approached Charles Schulz and the syndicate that owned Peanuts, and — as the story goes — sweetened the deal by pointing out that Snoopy could literally go to the Moon. Schulz, a genuine space enthusiast, loved the idea and let NASA use “Snoopy the Astronaut” completely free of charge. He even hand-drew the artwork the pin is based on himself.
What the award actually is
The Silver Snoopy Award, first given out in 1968, isn’t handed out by NASA management; it’s given personally by astronauts to NASA employees and contractors who’ve gone above and beyond for flight safety and mission success. That’s the detail that makes it special: it’s peer recognition from the very people whose lives depend on this work.
The physical award has three parts:
- A sterling silver lapel pin depicting Snoopy in a spacesuit (crucially, this specific pin has actually flown on a NASA space mission before being presented).
- A signed, framed certificate.
- A commendation letter stating exactly which mission the pin flew on.
The bar is deliberately high. Fewer than 1% of the NASA and contractor workforce receives it in any given year, and a person can only ever receive it once — it’s not given for retirement, seniority, or general good service. It’s reserved for specific, verifiable contributions: catching a critical safety issue, engineering a fix that boosted mission reliability, or saving significant costs on human spaceflight programmes.
Even senior managers above a certain level are usually excluded, keeping it focused on the engineers and technicians actually doing the hands-on work.
Sidebar: Omega’s own Silver Snoopy
Here’s a fun crossover: NASA doesn’t only give this award to individuals. In 1970, Omega (the watch brand) received a Silver Snoopy Award too, presented by astronaut Thomas Stafford.
This was recognition for the Omega Speedmaster’s role in getting the Apollo 13 crew home safely after their oxygen tank exploded en route to the Moon; the crew reportedly used their Speedmaster to time a critical 14-second engine burn for course correction after onboard systems failed.
Omega has leaned into this heavily ever since, releasing several “Silver Snoopy Award” limited-edition Speedmasters: in 2003, 2015 (for Apollo 13’s 45th anniversary, limited to 1,970 pieces), and a 2020 50th-anniversary edition. Each features a small sterling silver Snoopy medallion on the caseback, often stamped “Ag925” — the same 92.5% silver alloy used in NASA’s actual pins — as a nod back to the original award.
It’s a nice example of how a single quirky NASA tradition rippled out into pop culture and even luxury watchmaking decades later.
The tradition today
More than 55 years later, the Silver Snoopy is still going strong, run under NASA’s Space Flight Awareness programme. Astronauts still personally pin it on recipients at their workplace, in front of coworkers.
Snoopy himself has kept flying too. A Snoopy plush served as the “zero-gravity indicator” on Artemis I in 2022, floating the moment the spacecraft reached weightlessness, continuing a partnership between NASA and Peanuts that’s now lasted longer than most companies exist.
