Trustpilot
Think about what you’d strap to your wrist if your life depended on it. Not your style. Not your status. Your actual survival. That’s the question NASA engineers had to answer in the early 1960s, and the watches worn in space since then weren’t picked because they looked good in a catalogue. They were picked because they refused to break. Baked at 93°C, frozen to -18°C, shaken violently, and thrown into a vacuum. The ones that survived earned a seat on the rocket.
The Omega Speedmaster and the Moon
You can’t talk about watches worn in space without starting here. The Omega Speedmaster Professional. The Moonwatch. Probably the most storied wristwatch on the planet, and technically off it.
NASA started hunting for an official flight chronograph in 1962. They bought watches off the shelf from Omega, Rolex, Longines, and Hamilton, then tortured them. Temperature shocks. Humidity chambers. Vibration rigs that simulated a Saturn V launch. Decompression tests. High-oxygen environments. One by one, the others failed. The Speedmaster ref. 105.003 didn’t. It passed every single test.
By 1965, NASA had certified it “flight qualified for all manned space missions.” And on 20 July 1969, Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the lunar surface wearing his Speedmaster Professional on the outside of his spacesuit. Neil Armstrong? He’d left his inside the Lunar Module. The onboard electronic timer had packed in, so Armstrong’s Speedmaster was serving as the backup clock. Aldrin’s became the first watch on the Moon.
But here’s the bit that really gets watch people talking. Apollo 13. April 1970. The mission’s gone sideways, the crew’s trying to get home alive, and astronaut Jack Swigert needs to time a 14-second engine burn to correct their re-entry trajectory. Too short and they skip off the atmosphere into deep space. Too long and they come in too steep. He timed it on his Speedmaster. Fourteen seconds. The crew made it home.
Did You Know
NASA still certifies the Omega Speedmaster Professional for crewed missions. It’s been continuously flight-qualified since 1965. Sixty-one years and counting. Nothing else comes close.
Why Was the Omega Speedmaster Chosen Over Other Watches
Manual wind. That’s the first thing. The Calibre 321 movement had no automatic rotor, which meant one less moving part that could seize or behave unpredictably in microgravity. Fewer things to go wrong.
Then there’s the crystal. Omega used Hesalite, an acrylic material, instead of sapphire. Sapphire is harder, yes. But when sapphire shatters, it throws tiny glass shards everywhere. In zero gravity, those fragments float through the cabin and into your eyes, your lungs, your equipment. Hesalite cracks but holds together. It was a deliberate engineering decision, not a cost-saving one.
And the dial was just brilliantly legible. Clean. High contrast. Tachymeter bezel for calculating speed during orbital burns. Chronograph pushers that worked with pressurised gloves on. This wasn’t a dress watch pretending to be a tool. It was a tool, full stop.
Before the Moonwatch Came the Breitling Cosmonaute
Omega gets all the glory, but the first Swiss watch in orbit was actually a Breitling. Astronaut Scott Carpenter wore a modified Navitimer Cosmonaute aboard the Aurora 7 Mercury capsule on 24 May 1962. Seven years before Apollo 11.
Carpenter had asked Breitling for something specific. A 24-hour dial. Makes perfect sense when you think about it. In low Earth orbit, the sun rises and sets roughly every 90 minutes. A normal 12-hour watch face becomes useless for tracking actual time of day. Breitling rebuilt the Navitimer with a full 24-hour movement, and Carpenter wore it through three orbits of the Earth.
It wasn’t a NASA-issued piece. Carpenter chose it himself. But it proved something crucial. A mechanical watch could handle orbital flight. The vibration, the g-forces, the temperature swings. All survivable. That proof of concept paved the way for NASA’s formal chronograph programme, and ultimately for the Speedmaster’s certification three years later.
The Watches That Kept the Space Station Running
Apollo ended. The Space Shuttle programme picked up. Then came the space stations, Mir and the ISS, where crews weren’t visiting space for days but living there for months. Six-month rotations became standard. The watches had to last accordingly.
Russia went with Fortis. The B-42 Official Cosmonauts Chronograph has been standard issue for the Russian space programme since the mid-1990s. Cosmonauts wore it on Mir and continue to wear it aboard the ISS. Fortis built the B-42 around a tough automatic movement with exceptional readability, a big dial, and hands you could read in poor lighting. They even produced a version with a transparent case back so engineers could visually inspect the movement without cracking the case open. Clever thinking for an environment where you can’t exactly pop to a watchmaker.
The Americans stuck with Omega, mostly. The Speedmaster Professional stayed on the roster, but NASA also approved the X-33. Completely different beast. Quartz-driven, analogue-digital hybrid, built specifically for Shuttle missions. Multiple time zones, mission elapsed timers, countdown functions. It bridged the gap between traditional astronaut watches and the digital tools modern crews actually needed day to day.
Did Astronauts Ever Wear Digital Watches in Space
All the time. The Casio G-Shock DW-5600 became a quiet favourite with Shuttle crews through the nineties and into the 2000s. Light, cheap, accurate, and practically unkillable. NASA never formally certified it, but multiple astronauts wore one as a personal backup alongside their issued Speedmaster. When people who go to space for a living choose to wear something voluntarily, that tells you everything about how reliable it is.
Why Space Watches Still Matter Today
Modern capsules are stuffed with digital clocks, GPS synchronisation, and redundant computer systems. A mechanical watch on an astronaut’s wrist is, technically, obsolete. But they still wear them. And there’s a good reason.
A mechanical watch needs no battery. No software. No satellite link. No power supply at all beyond the mainspring. If every screen on the flight deck goes dark simultaneously, the Speedmaster on your wrist is still counting seconds. It’s the ultimate analogue backup, and in spaceflight, backups aren’t optional.
There’s something else, though. Something harder to quantify. These watches went to places that would kill an unprotected human in seconds, and they came back working. That kind of heritage sticks. It’s why the Speedmaster remains one of the most coveted watches in the world sixty years after it first left the atmosphere. And it’s why Omega’s MoonSwatch collaboration with Swatch struck such a chord. It took that legacy and made it accessible.
Fancy owning a piece of that story yourself? The Time Vault Club is running an Omega Swatch Mission to the Moon competition right now, with entries from £3.50.
The Legacy Continues
Scott Carpenter’s Breitling Cosmonaute in 1962. Buzz Aldrin’s Speedmaster on the Moon in 1969. Jack Swigert’s 14-second burn on Apollo 13. Fortis chronographs ticking away on six-month ISS rotations. Casio G-Shocks floating around the Shuttle mid-deck. The story of watches worn in space isn’t really about watches. It’s about building something so reliable that it works in conditions specifically designed to destroy it.
Whether you’ve been collecting for decades or you’re just getting pulled into the world of horology, knowing what these watches actually went through changes how you look at them. It goes well beyond the spec sheet. Dig into more stories like this in our resources section, or take a look at our live competitions if you fancy adding something with real heritage to your wrist.
Win an Omega Swatch Mission to the Moon
Our live competition is open now, with tickets from just £3.50 and limited entries to give you better odds. Not sure how it all works? Check out our guide to competitions, then enter the competition here.