Omega Speedmaster makes a giant leap back

Omega didn’t know it at the time, but one of NASA’s earliest astronauts, Walter M. ‘Wally’ Schirra had taken a shine to Biel/Bienne’s pre-eminent watchmaker. Specifically, its relatively new entry to the post-war boom in mechanical stopwatch wristwatches, or ‘chronographs’, the Speedmaster. 

Long before its qualification as the American space agency’s standard-issue timepiece for the Apollo moonshot, Captain Schirra purchased his own ‘Speedie’ (as collectors would have it) as his own personal watch. And then he wore it on the Sigma 7 mission of the Mercury programme in 1962, completing – solo – America’s third and then-longest orbital spaceflight: six orbits of the Earth, before splashdown in a frighteningly small capsule.

In that moment, the ‘CK 2998’ strapped around Schirra’s spacesuit earned its (eventual) nickname, ‘The First OMEGA in Space’. It’s a nickname that lends itself to a faithful reissue of that 2nd-gen design of 1959, complete with slender ‘Alpha’ hands, symmetrical case and an alluringly dark bezel, all underpinned by the bells and whistles that Omega has been assiduously refining. Real-world anti-obsolescence, of which any aviating engineer would surely approve, includes frictionless ‘co-axial’ technology ticking away as-standard, now allied with Switzerland’s METAS metrology institute, which reassures customers of its micro-mechanics’ resistance to magnetism.

• Omega Speedmaster, £7,100 – BUY IT HERE