New Omega Museum (opened July 2019)

Had great visits there in 2012 and 2013, looks like 2019 might see the unveiling of the new museum ;-)

Indeed an exact timing celebrating exciting Omega anniversaries... in 2019 ;
1894-2019 = 125 years "Omega" name
1969-2019 = 50 years Alaska Project
1969-2019 = 50 years Apollo 11
1969-2019 = 50 years Flightmaster
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Stuff we would like to see in the Omega museum - part 1
spacesuits... they should correct the Apollo suit ( Red stripes were used since Apollo 14, so make the current mannequin Apollo 17 or remove the stripes for an Armstrong or Aldrin representation )... Speedmasters are still worn on Russian Orlan spacesuits, shouldn't be difficult to get one for the museum...
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Stuff we would like to see in the Omega museum - part 2
As it's SpeedyTuesday we reflect on the fact that Omega must be busy with the relocation of their museum... at least we think so 👎
Apollo-flown Speedmasters... one of each mission, Apollo 7 to ASTP, should be doable as it's only 12 out of about 46 watches ... preferably with some background information... as always, my photo is only for illustration purposes
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I plan on visiting the museum someday but haven’t had the opportunity yet. Something to plan for!

Thanks for the great post!

One more to finish it off... Stuff we would like to see in the Omega museum - part 3
Since the Speedmaster was selected by NASA as a flight-qualified chronograph, Omega brought out some amazing PR items...
Here's a 1968 Apollo 8 mission analyzer, a cardboard timeline device that allowed the user to move the wheels to cross reference mission events (LOI, Re-entry, Landing & Splashdown) against times in mission elapsed times... sponsored by Your favorite watch make Omega!
IMHO one of the best goodies ever given by Omega to their Speedmaster clients... Later Apollo mission analyzers were sponsored by other firms such as Raytheon and IBM.

Wow that looks so cool, would look great in my living room 😀

Definitely should visit it then.

Plan to visit August 8th, 2018. Any tips for visiting?

I do plan to bring my Mark3 and see if they will agree to fix the extract. The extract says its a black dial but it is blue.

Well if your schedule allows some beers, I am living not even 30 Minutes away and could eventually join 😉 PM 👍

Thanks for the updated pictures of the new museum speedyphill.I hope it's open by the time I plan to go sometime next year. It's top on my list followed by the Patek museum.

No news thus far... https://www.omegawatches.com/planet-omega/heritage/museum/

Planning the trip now. I think I might be able swing two nights in Biel. Wife and kids actually want to visit Omega museum, but when I told them it would be all day, they agreed to an hour or so together and then they will take off and pick me up later. 😀

1984 to 2019 = 35 years Omega Museum ... yet another anniversary for next year !

With the important set up at the July 2nd 2018 Night at the Omega Museum to introduce their LE 1913 first wrist-chronograph and promoting Omega's Atelier Tourbillon ... we might look forward to an equal big set up for the official opening of the renewed Omega museum next year...

Now this is interesting,,,,,,driving a lunar rover down the streets of Bienne -

https://www.vanityfair.com/london/2018/08/lunar-roving-vehicle-omega-test-drive

Lunar Roving Vehicle: One Small Schlep
Houston, we have a Lunar Roving Vehicle near the Europizza takeaway in Bienne...


©ScanderbegSauer 2018
I can’t help but think that those early astronauts had it rather easy. As far as I can tell the chief qualifications for the job seem to have been a geometrically correct hairdo and a snappy catchphrase (“One small step for man…”, “To infinity and beyond” or “To boldly go where no man has gone before”). It also helped to have been able to preface most observations with the words “Houston, we have lift-off/a problem/just passed the Europizza takeaway on the junction of Paul-Emile-Brandt-Strasse and Jakob-Stämpfli-Strasse.” It doesn’t have quite the orotund profundity of the “One giant leap for mankind” stuff, but then the astronauts on the Apollo missions never had to tackle lunchtime traffic in downtown Bienne, in the canton of Bern.

Bienne, or Biel, is where the Omega watch company is headquartered, and if there is one thing that everyone knows about Omega it is that its watches were worn on the moon. If you are in any doubt, just visit the Omega Museum, where the ludicrously well-informed curator Petros knows so much about NASA that I am surprised he has not been snapped up to work on the European space project. The Omega Museum bristles with bric-a-brac from the days of lunar exploration, ranging from Eugene “Gene” Cernan and Richard F. Gordon’s original NASA-issued Omegas, Hasselblad 500EL cameras, pieces from the outer hull of space vehicles, and a full-size functioning moon buggy—or Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV), to call a spade an edged digging implement.

It was over lunch with Omega CEO Raynald Aeschlimann a few months ago that I idly mused what it would be like to drive such a thing. I must have mused out loud, as Raynald answered, “Why don’t you give it a try?”

And so one glorious late spring day in Bienne, I found myself outside the new Omega factory looking at something that resembled a stripped-down vehicle of the sort used to move the elderly around airports, albeit “pimped” with gold milk-bottle tops, sweet wrappers, nylon tarpaulins that might once have been white, and Velcro. Lots and lots of Velcro. I understand that Velcro was an invention that came into being during the Space Race, and to judge from the amount of it on the bodywork they had rather a lot of it to use up.

My first observation is that for an open-topped vehicle, NASA went the extra mile when it came to restricting visibility. A pistol-grip camera is mounted at eye level, while another large, gold, foil-covered camera of a size better suited to the side of a building blocks the view out over the nearside front wing. The offside front wing carries a satellite dish, no doubt vital in the days before iPhone but now only a source of visual impairment.

According to my friends at Wikipedia, the LRV programme cost NASA about $38m in the 1970s. It would have been more, but they saved a few bucks by skipping even the smallest rear-view mirror (unlike Bienne, there was scant traffic on the moon). The rear view was further restricted by seats and head restraints that combined the solid aesthetics of an ejector seat with the dimensions of the baldaquin under which the throne of HM the Queen is placed in Buckingham Palace. I would have needed to be about nine feet tall to look over the top of it, but by twisting round and craning my neck I could enjoy the slit of a view of the road between the two chairs.


©ScanderbegSauer 2018
Of course, this being a true vehicle of the Space Age there’s nothing as old-fashioned as a steering wheel—instead, the vehicle is directed using a large, white, hammer-headed joystick—while battery charge and speed are displayed on an agreeably retro LED display at the top of a bewildering control panel featuring 14 switches, four white buttons, two larger, rather menacing red buttons, plus dials and scales to give me all the information I needed, from battery temperature to my bearing. Alas, there was no cigar lighter.

A quick exploration of the joystick and I was just about ready to inform Houston of my intention to hit the road when Petros appeared at the side of the buggy brandishing a watch with yet more Velcro. This was the Speedmaster that had been worn by astronaut Richard F. Gordon of Apollo 12, which had not quite gone to the moon but round it. Given that I was already wearing my own 1969 Nixon-spec Space Race-victory Speedmaster BA145.022, this was part backup, part good-luck talisman; and in what was apparently the NASA-approved manner, it was wound around the right sleeve of the dogtooth-checked suit I was wearing.

With a cheery wave and a sense of apprehension, I turned the key, threw the joystick forward and, demonstrating the surging power of a rather lethargic sloth, the LRV started to move—slowly at first, but soon the LED was blinking as the figures climbed: 5mph, 6mph, until I was nudging a healthy 11.8mph. By then it was all getting a bit alarming. According to my watches, it had taken 16.4 seconds to build up this momentous speed and by now I was running out of road (or, more specifically, asphalt beside the factory). Just in time I found the brake pedal. It is where the accelerator should be.

It would overstretch the most elastic imagination to describe me as a good driver—I once crashed a quad bike into a tree in the middle of a desert—but there was a sense of familiarity about this strange vehicle. It reminds me a little of my Mini Moke: near to the ground, not particularly quick and disproportionately alarming. It is no easy thing to keep the joystick perfectly straight at speeds over 9.5mph, but with a bit of practice and ducking down behind the camera to decrease the wind resistance and make the car more streamlined, I managed to hit 12.5mph on one pass before attempting to enter the flower bed.


©ScanderbegSauer 2018
Thus prepared, it was time to take her for a spin on the roads. The LRV is not a car in which to make handbrake turns or take emergency evasive action. Turn too abruptly and the car loses speed and appears to give considerable thought to whether it really wants to go to the bother of moving left or right. It signals assent with an ominous creak audible over the constant asthmatic whine that is the LRV’s predominant engine note. And, if it has to think about whether it feels like turning, try to put it into reverse too violently and one risks provoking an existential crisis as the vehicle conducts a Hamletic debate with itself.

This can be a little tense for the driver, as I found when I made contact with the central reservation of the Jakob-Stämpfli-Strasse. Panicking and fearing the obloquy of the tail of traffic that had built up behind me, I yanked the joystick so forcefully that, as the LRV remained stationary, I feared that I had broken it. It seemed like a minute passed before serious clicks and a whirring noise signalled the decision to move backwards and slowly, painfully slowly, the front wheel moved off the concrete and back onto the tarmac.

In order to avoid any other such mishaps during my road test, I determined to keep it under 9.5mph; admittedly, this reduced the feel of wind in the hair and was less spirited than that glorious 12.5mph, but after a while I got used to being overtaken by schoolchildren on bicycles, young mothers pushing prams and old people out for a brisk constitutional with their walking frames.

The big test was still ahead of me. A roundabout loomed and I viewed it with about the same enthusiasm as Jim Lovell of the stricken Apollo 13 must have anticipated the circumlunar emergency manoeuvre that took him to the dark side of the moon. The LRV is unlike a London taxi in many ways, not least its inability to turn on a sixpence: its turning circle is roughly the circumference of my native Shepherd’s Bush’s roundabout.

As it happened, machine and man were as one. NASA would have been proud of the way I circumscribed this traffic-calming feature. Showing no little skill, I managed to make it round in well under two minutes before beginning the triumphal journey back to the factory—although I was not accorded the ticker-tape welcome given to returning spacemen, I felt considerable satisfaction.

Such was my elation that on passing Europizza again, I contemplated pulling in and ordering a margherita to bring back with me, as I find pizza of far more use than bits of moon rock. But on mature reflection I decided against it. After all, the factory gates must have been at least 200 metres away and I was afraid that at my speed the pizza would be cold by the time I reached them.

I believe Omega has at least two of these replica LRV ... one on display and one they lend out for events.
Here's a recent photo taken at the first floor - entrance of the current Omega museum in Bienne-Biel Switzerland.
The other photo is a close up of the image on display, showing Nicolas Hayek (1928-2010) old-CEO of the Swatch Group together with Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong and Swiss astronaut Claude Nicollier during a visit in the museum...
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