The Speedmaster and the Moon

NASA bought watches anonymously from a Houston shop and tortured them at seventy-one degrees, forty g and pure oxygen. Only one survived — and it was already eight years old.

The Speedmaster was designed for motor racing, not for space. When Omega introduced the CK2915 in 1957 its innovation was moving the tachymeter scale from the dial onto the bezel, which cleared the dial and made the scale readable at a glance. It was a driver's chronograph, and for its first seven years that is all it was.

In 1964 NASA needed a wristwatch for its astronauts and did not want to be sold one. An engineer named James Ragan wrote a specification, and the agency bought candidates anonymously from a jeweller's shop in Houston so that no manufacturer could prepare a special sample. Several houses were represented. The watches were then subjected to a test regime designed to destroy them.

Forty-eight hours at seventy-one degrees Celsius followed by four hours at ninety-three. Cooling to minus eighteen. Ninety-five per cent humidity. An atmosphere of pure oxygen. Six shocks of forty g from six directions. Vibration, acceleration to sixteen g, decompression to near vacuum and repressurisation. The competitors stopped, fogged, or had their crystals distort and lift away. The Omega ran, and it ran within specification.

It was flight-qualified on the first of March 1965 for all manned space missions, and worn later that month on Gemini 3. Every crewed American spaceflight since has carried one.

On the twentieth of July 1969 Neil Armstrong left his in the lunar module: the craft's own electronic timer had failed and the watch was the backup. Buzz Aldrin wore his onto the surface, which is how a chronograph designed for timing laps at Sebring became the first watch worn on the Moon. Aldrin's was subsequently lost in transit to the Smithsonian and has never been recovered.

Its most useful hour came the following April. With Apollo 13 crippled and the guidance computer shut down to save power, the crew had to perform a mid-course correction by holding the spacecraft's attitude manually and firing the engine for exactly fourteen seconds. Jack Swigert timed it on his Speedmaster. NASA gave Omega the Silver Snoopy Award later that year, an honour granted by the astronauts themselves.

The watch that did all of this has changed remarkably little. The calibre 321 gave way to the 861 in 1968 and the 1861 after that, and only in 2021 did Omega fit the co-axial 3861 with a Master Chronometer certification. The crystal is still hesalite on the standard model, and not out of nostalgia: acrylic crazes rather than shatters, and NASA did not want fragments of sapphire loose in a capsule.

Which leaves the Speedmaster in an unusual position among famous watches. Almost every other legend was made by marketing after the fact. This one was made by an engineer in Houston who wanted to find out which watches broke, and by a fourteen-second burn two hundred thousand miles from home.