Apollo Snoopy Cap

Rare Communication Carrier Assembly cap, commonly known as the ‘Snoopy’ cap, made for astronaut Don Eisele, Command Module Pilot for Apollo 7. Manufactured by the David Clark Company during the nascent stages of the Apollo program.

A member of NASA’s third astronaut group, Eisele was selected as the original pilot for the Apollo 1 crew alongside Gus Grissom and Ed White II. He was later replaced by Roger Chaffee after suffering a pair of dislocated shoulders during training and was named to the crew of the follow-up flight of Apollo 2. This mission and all others were canceled in the wake of the tragic Apollo 1 fire, and Eisele and his crewmembers of Wally Schirra and Walt Cunningham would wait to fly until the program was ungrounded roughly two years later with the launch of Apollo 7. In his role as Command Module Pilot, Eisele performed simulated transposition and docking maneuvers with the upper stage of their Saturn IB launch vehicle, and acted as navigator, observing star sightings and aligning the spacecraft’s guidance and navigation platform. Eisele served as backup Command Module Pilot for the Apollo 10 flight and became technical assistant for manned spaceflight at the NASA Langley Research Center before retiring from both NASA and the Air Force in 1972.

Designed to secure the ear-cups and microphones the astronauts used for communications, these communication carriers have since become widely sought-after for their iconic affiliation with the Apollo astronauts and, of course, the canine mascot of the Peanuts comic strip. As such, ‘Snoopy’ caps deriving from the Apollo program remain exceedingly rare.

I plan to display this with the Apollo 15 flown headset and bubble helmet that I obtained separately (image links below).