Come Fly With Me

Swiss watchmaker OMEGA fetes its premier icon with a rousing rebirth and a series of watches in its honour.

- Andre Frois

DESPITE BEING THE first-ever watch certified for NASA space missions, the Omega Speedmaster was never designed for the intention of space travel. As its name suggests, the Speedmaster was conceived as a highly accurate, legible and robust motor racing timepiece, which indicated speed via the tachymeter along its bezel. However, its reliable grasp of time and velocity would land it a place in the most resounding of human triumphs.

As America raced against Russia to send a man to the moon, many of the world’s foremost watch brands were tested for the purpose of space exploration — but only Omega passed NASA’s stringent gauntlet of trials, which pitted many watches’ time-telling precision against extreme temperature, pressure, humidity, acceleration, vibration, acoustic noise, decompression as well as shock conditions.