Apollo 10 Command Module Charlie Brown
North American Rockwell Corporation · 1969
A scorched cone of metal, about four metres across, sits on a stand with its hatch open so that you can peer at the three couches inside. This is Charlie Brown, the command module of Apollo 10, and it has been to the Moon. In May 1969 Thomas Stafford, John Young and Eugene Cernan flew it around the Moon thirty one times as a full dress rehearsal for the landing that Apollo 11 would make two months later. The lunar module, nicknamed Snoopy, descended to within fifteen kilometres of the surface and then came back up, and the whole crew returned to Earth in this capsule, splashing down in the Pacific.
Look at the outside. The heat shield on the base and the streaked, blackened walls record the re-entry, when the spacecraft hit the atmosphere at nearly forty thousand kilometres an hour and the outer resin layer charred and flaked away by design. Inside, the control panel with its hundreds of switches sits above the couches, and the space is tighter than a small car. The crew lived in here for eight days. Apollo 10 also set the record for the fastest speed ever reached by a crewed vehicle on its way home.
The module belongs to the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum and has been lent to the Science Museum since 1976, one of only a handful of flown Apollo capsules outside the United States. In 2025 it moved into the new Space gallery, where it is shown beside Tim Peake's Soyuz descent module, the first time two crewed spacecraft from the American and Russian programmes have been displayed side by side. A memorable detail is the name: the crew chose Charlie Brown and Snoopy after the cartoon characters, and NASA was unsure whether that was dignified enough.
Did You Know? The crew named the two spacecraft Charlie Brown and Snoopy after the Peanuts cartoon, and NASA quietly wished they had chosen something grander.
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