Apollo 10 launched today with Tom Stafford in command, John Young on the command module, and Gene Cernan on the lunar module. They named the lunar module Snoopy. The command module is Charlie Brown. The people who do the official naming at NASA apparently decided this was appropriate.

It is, in fact, appropriate. Snoopy and Charlie Brown. The crew going all the way to the Moon to practice everything except landing, and then coming home.

The mission profile: travel to the Moon, enter lunar orbit, Stafford and Cernan take Snoopy down to 50,000 feet above the surface — 50,000 feet, which is about 9.5 miles — while Young orbits in Charlie Brown. Then return to the command module and come home.

They will fly over the Apollo 11 landing site, take photographs, verify the navigation data. Everything the landing crew needs to have checked, they will check. The only step they won’t take is the actual descent to the surface. They’ll get close enough to see rocks. And then they’ll fire the ascent engine and go back up.

There have been some jokes about why they didn’t just land while they were there. The honest answer involves propellant loading: Snoopy was not loaded with the quantity of propellant needed for a full landing descent. If Stafford and Cernan had tried to land, they would have run out of fuel before reaching the surface. The mission was designed specifically so they couldn’t land even if they wanted to.

Gene Cernan, who as of yesterday has never walked on the Moon but will come closer tomorrow than anyone ever has, said in an interview that it was going to be very difficult to fly 50,000 feet over the surface and then turn around. He said he trusted the mission design and trusted that it was necessary. He said it wasn’t easy.

I believe him. The hardest thing about discipline is not using a capability you have when the rules say don’t. Cernan is going to be 9 miles above the Moon. He could, in principle, continue down. He won’t.

That’s discipline in the service of something larger than the individual moment.

Go, Snoopy. Show us the landing site.