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This is an archive article published on July 18, 2023

Story of Buzz Aldrin’s watch: How the Omega Speedmaster reached the Moon

Almost 60 years ago, NASA put chronographs built by three top watchmakers through a series of tests to check how they coped with extreme variations of temperature and pressure. Omega’s Speedmaster ‘Moonwatch’ won the contest.

Buzz Aldrin wearning Omega SpeedmasterThis July 20, 1969 photograph of the interior view of the Apollo 11 lunar module shows astronaut Edwin E ‘Buzz’ Aldrin during the lunar landing mission. He is wearing the Moonwatch. (Photo: NASA)
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Story of Buzz Aldrin’s watch: How the Omega Speedmaster reached the Moon
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On Sunday (July 16), Buzz Aldrin, the second human to set foot on the Moon, posted a picture of himself having a celebratory meal on Twitter. Aldrin was the pilot of Eagle, the lunar module of NASA’s Apollo 11 mission, which lifted off from Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island, Florida, on July 16, 1969.

Around 110 hours later, mission commander Neil Armstrong made the iconic announcement, “The Eagle Has Landed” — and took his “giant leap for mankind” by setting foot on the surface of the Moon. He was followed by Aldrin, who went by the first name of Edwin at the time. The third astronaut on the mission, Michael Collins, flew the command module Columbia around the Moon as the lunar module made a touchdown.

But this story is not about the Apollo 11 mission. It is about the picture that Buzz Aldrin, now 93, and the lone surviving member of the mission, posted on the 54th anniversary of their historic takeoff for the Moon. Or rather, one curious feature of that picture.

Buzz Aldrin’s Moonwatch

Aldrin is sitting in an Apollo 11 T-shirt with a large plate of steak and eggs. But he is wearing not one, but three wristwatches — two on his left hand, the third on his right. The watches are all different models of the Omega Speedmaster.

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It was an Omega Speedmaster that Aldrin was wearing when he set foot on the Moon, which subsequently earned the instrument the moniker ‘Moonwatch’.

Although the specific timepiece that Aldrin had on his wrist on the mission went missing, its legacy has endured over the years. Today, the Omega Speedmaster remains in production, and its variants are some of the most coveted watches among aficionados.

This is the story of how the Omega Speedmaster reached the Moon.

Apollo 11 Crew Official crew photo of the Apollo 11 Prime Crew. From left to right are astronauts Neil A Armstrong, Commander; Michael Collins, Command Module Pilot; and Edwin E Aldrin Jr, Lunar Module Pilot. (Photo: NASA)

NASA’s call for watches

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It wasn’t that Omega, the Swiss watchmaker that is now part of the Swatch Group, the world’s biggest watch company, had specially manufactured the Speedmaster for the Apollo 11 mission. In 1957, four years before President John F Kennedy set for America the national goal of accomplishing a crewed lunar landing and return to Earth, the Speedmaster was already in production.

The timepiece was a chronograph, which means that apart from displaying the time, it could also act as a stopwatch, and was mostly used by race car drivers and pilots to track fuel consumption and trajectory.

In 1964, James H Ragan, an engineer at NASA, wrote to several prominent watchmakers, requesting them to send “high-quality chronographs” along with their quotations and specification sheets in order to pick a certified watch for the space agency’s astronauts. Four brands responded: Longines, Rolex, and Omega, all of them Swiss; and Hamilton, which was then an American company.

How Speedmaster forged ahead

Hamilton was disqualified after it proposed a pocket-watch chronograph instead of the wristwatch that NASA required.

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Thereafter, “Mr Ragan went on and procured 3 to 4 pieces per brand (Longines-Wittnauer, Rolex and OMEGA), and the legendary tests were carried out with these pieces and under these three brands,” Monochrome, an online watch magazine, said in a report published in August 2014. All the watches were mechanical timepieces, meaning they used a clockwork mechanism to tell the time, unlike today’s quartz watches, which use a battery.

“The watches underwent a series of processes called the “Qualification Test Procedures, which included 11 different tests,” the Monochrome report said.

They spent 48 hours at 70 degrees Celsius, followed by 30 minutes at 93 degrees Celsius, and then four hours at minus 18 degrees Celsius; they were then put through fifteen 45-minute cycles alternating between 71 degrees Celsius and minus 18 degrees Celsius; six shocks of 40 g, each 11 millisecond (thousandth of a second) in duration, in six different directions; high pressure of 1.6 atmosphere (1 atm is approximately the pressure at mean sea level) for a minimum period of an hour; acceleration from standstill to 7.25 g (g is the acceleration equal to gravity, or 9.81 m/s2) within five minutes, then 16 g for 30 seconds, along three axes; three cycles of vibration from 5 Hz to 2,000 Hz for 30 minutes; and decompression for 90 minutes in a near vacuum at 10 raised to minus 6 atm.

The Speedmaster watches were the only ones that could pass all the tests, and in March 1965, NASA officially designated them as “flight-qualified for all manned space missions”.

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Buzz Aldrin wearing Speedmaster Astronaut Buzz Aldrin walks on the surface of the Moon near the leg of the lunar module Eagle during the Apollo 11 mission. His Omega Speedmaster can be seen on his right wrist. Mission commander Neil Armstrong took this photograph with a 70mm lunar surface camera. (Photo: NASA)

Three weeks later, the Speedmaster officially flew to space on the wrists of astronauts Virgil “Gus” Grissom and John Young, who were part of the Gemini 3 mission. That same year, astronaut Edward White wore the watch over his spacesuit when he became the first American to walk in space. It seemed obvious that whenever NASA put a human on the Moon, the Speedmaster would go along.

Armstrong’s Speedmaster, and Aldrin’s

The Speedmaster that went to the Moon was the fourth-generation edition of the timepiece. Although both Armstrong and Aldrin were wearing the watch (both were ST105.012 reference number models, according to the Monochrome report), only one — the one on Aldrin’s wrist finally reached the lunar surface.

According to a report in Hodinkee watch magazine, this was because Armstrong decided to leave his watch behind in the lunar module as a backup, because the module’s mission timer had failed. Aldrin’s historic watch, the one he wore on the Moon, eventually went missing.

Case of the missing Speedmaster

In his memoir, ‘Return to Earth’, Aldrin recounted that after the Apollo 11 mission, members of the Smithsonian Institution — a group of museums, education and research centres in the US — approached him, asking if they could exhibit his Speedmaster. He readily agreed to handover his watch to them.

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However, “When the packages arrived at the Smithsonian, the watch — along with several medals — was missing. NASA quickly launched a security investigation but could not turn up any clues,” the former astronaut wrote. Although the investigation was eventually closed, over the years, several claims of discovering Aldrin’s Speedmaster have emerged. However, none of them could prove the authenticity of the timepieces concerned.      

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