The Golden Anniversary

50 years ago, in the few historic hours on July 20, two men from Earth walked on the moon surface for the first time – and Omega was there.

- John Ng

THE COLLABORATION

Equipped with an Omega Speedmaster, astronauts Neil A. Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin Jr. embarked on the Apollo 11 Saturn V rocket on July 16, 1969, at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Five years prior, in 1964, the NASA program office set out to find a watch that it could depend on for all its manned missions. Flight crew operations director Deke Slayton immediately issued a request for wrist-worn chronographs from different watch manufacturers around the world.

Numerous brands, including Omega, submitted their watches but only one came out on top: the Omega Speedmaster – first developed in 1957 for racing car drivers and their engineers (hence the tachymeter scale on the bezel) – was declared “Flight Qualified for all Manned Space Missions” on March 1, 1965. From then on, Omega became the sole supplier of watches for NASA’s Human Space Flight Program.

The Eagle landed calmly in the Sea of Tranquility on July 20, 1969, where Armstrong and Aldrin became the first people to walk on the moon. All the equipment were working the way they were supposed to, including the Omega Speedmaster – which should come as no surprise given that it passed 11 punishing tests such as extreme temperatures, vacuum, shock and vibration.

James Ragan, the NASA engineer responsible for testing and acquiring the watches before ultimately qualifying the Omega Speedmaster, spoke about the importance of a watch in space, saying: “The watch was a backup. If the astronauts lost the capability of talking to the ground, or the capability of their digital timers on the lunar surface, then the only thing they had to rely on was the Omega watch they had on their wrist. It needed to be there for them if they had a problem.”