Chronosect

Hour of the Moon - the space race clocks

In the years following the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union and the United States challenged each other in an all-out duel for the conquest of global primacy.

The most fascinating of the rivalries between the two giants was certainly the one experienced in space. It was the USSR that achieved the first major successes in this competition: the first satellite and the first astronaut were respectively Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin.

America certainly did not stand by and President Kennedy announced in the early XNUMXs that the US would take a man to the moon (and bring him back) by the end of the decade. It was a challenge of immense proportions, which required the mobilization of enormous resources, in all fields, in America and beyond.

Clocks in space

The world of watchmaking was also involved in the space race. LDue to the need to have reliable, precise and above all robust chronometers to overcome the conditions of absolute vacuum and extreme cold unscathed, he soon restricted the field of possible options to only two Western companies capable of guaranteeing the necessary reliability: Rolex e Omega. It is true that the Soviet bloc had its own watch manufacturers, who had already gone into space, but in the climate of the Cold War, the Soviets could certainly not be asked to supply watches to the Americans ...

Everyone knows that in the end the now famous was selected Omega Speedmaster, which still bears the nickname of "moon watch". Less well known is the “face Rolex”Of the story, which we will tell here.

Rolex versus Omega: the Daytona and the Speedmaster

Rolex had already in the XNUMXs a well-deserved reputation for robustness, deriving from its undoubted build quality. Thanks to this, Rolex watches had been chosen by great explorers, such as Sir Edmund Hillary who brought the Rolex Explorer on Everest, by CERN scientists, who wore the Rolex Milgauss, by divers with the Rolex Submariner, by the explorers of the Mariana Trench, who descended into the deepest abyss on the planet with a Rolex Deep Sea Special attached to the outside of the bathyscaphe. And this, just to remember the most striking enterprises.

Rolex she was involved from the beginning, together with Omega, in the competition to make the watch that the astronauts would wear on the moon, and from the beginning she believed very much in the enterprise, so much so that she baptized her chronograph "Rolex Cosmograph Daytona“, Indicating it as suitable for both cosmonauts and professional pilots who competed on the track of Daytona. Paradoxically, the rival christened her chronograph "Omega Speedmaster“, Believing that it would be coveted above all by lovers of speed on four wheels.

The NASA tests, in which the Longines-Wittnauer 242T, the Rolex Daytona andOmega Speedmaster, saw the emergenceOmega Speedmaster as the most robust and reliable of the three watches. Subsequently, theOmega Speedmaster underwent some modifications, at the request of NASA, such as the addition of a rotating bezel graduated on 24 hours and the use of larger pushers for the chronograph.

A curiosity: the specimen of Omega Speedmaster worn by Buzz Aldrin during the Apollo mission is expected to be exhibited at the Smithsonian Museum, but was stolen during a transfer in 1970. The fate of theOmega Speedmaster of Aldrin is still unknown, and is one of the mysteries of contemporary watchmaking.

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Pictured: Buzz Aldrin aboard Apollo 11, with his Omega Speedmaster on display