As we celebrate the 40th anniversary of humanity’s first moon landing, we reflect on the incredible engineering achievement and countless hours of work undertaken by so many engineers to make it possible to put a human on the moon. Whilst we reflect, we also look towards the future and consider what comes next in our quest to expand our boundaries and strive for great things.

US President Barack Obama is today meeting with the astronauts who took those “giant leaps for mankind”, the men of the orginal moon landing. These same men propose to entertain the idea that we should now be focusing on the more exciting prospect of landing on Mars rather than returning to the moon in 2020.

The current proposal, the Constellation Project set up by former president George W Bush is currently in doubt due to the prohibitive cost, especially given the current ecconomic situation and Obama has ordered a thorough examination of the project.

Let us hope that future human space exploration does not get hindered once again by short-sighted monetary concerns.
A sports watch that is no stranger of space travel is the Omega Speedmaster Professional. Omega SA, based in Biel/Bienne Switzerland are highly regarded for their high-end sports watches, in particular their Seamaster line of diving watches, but it was back in the days of space race that Omega’s prospects went extra-terrestrial.

While preparing for space missions, NASA realized they had no wrist watch that was tested in space. Under normal circumstances, the space agency would solicit bids from watch manufacturers for the design, a process that is time-consuming, so to short-track their selection process they sent representitves to downtown Houston to find suitable consumer watches to put through a series of rigorous tests. For their purposes they required a manual winding watch due to the ineffectiveness of self-winding mechanics in zero gravity.

NASA agents returned with time pieces from Bulova, Breitling, Rolex, Heuer and Longines and tested them one by one for corrosion, shock, pressure, acceleration, noise, vibration, vacuum and intense humidity. All except the Speedmaster failed the testing and so the Omega Speedmaster watch became the “Officially Certified Wristwatch” for all NASA manned missions.

The Speedmaster Professional, now NASA’s official space watch, first left the earth during the Christmas of 1968, when Frank Borman and his crew performed the first manned orbit around the moon and earned its “moon watch” name, in 1969 when it became the first watch worn on moon the moment Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the lunar surface. Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon had left his Speedmaster watch back in the Lunar Module as a backup timer for an instrument that had failed.

The Omega Speedmaster watch was not only used in the American space program, the former USSR also selected the Omega Speedmaster professional as their timepiece for the Apollo-Soyuz missions.

The MIR space station was permanently occupied for almost ten years and in 1997, three Omega Speedmaster Professional watches were delivered to the station, one was the Professional “Moon Watch&”, the only watch that was certified by NASA for extra-vehicular EVA use. The other watches were another type of Speedmaster Professional, the X-33 which are multifunction quartz watches and unlike the original Speedmaster, the X-33 was developed specifically for use in space. It was chosen as the offical watch of the MIR space station.

View Omega Speedmaster Professional Watches here