A  human landing on the moon being considerably harder to carry out than a quick orbital flight, in September 1967, Owen Maynard of the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, Texas proposed a series of Apollo missions leading up to it. A total of seven were conceived to chart a course to the moon, designate and explore a landing site, and test takeoff and landing procedures. With those the main purposes, each mission in itself would make use of other technologies to further the science of space exploration.

On this day, May 10, in 1969, the Apollo 10 spacecraft, outfitted with a color television camera, transmitted to earth the first color images from space (the first black and white ones were broadcast by the Apollo 7 crew in 1967.)

As the moon was a fairly black and white and gray affair in itself, even a color image of it would not be much distinguishable from a regular black and white image. The Apollo crew pointed to colored pictures of Charles Schulz’s Snoopy dog (the nickname given to their lunar module) to test the color. Of course as the vast majority of televisions in American were still black and white at the time, the color broadcast of snoopy failed to wow many.