About a week ago, I was contacted by Lawrence, a fan of Speedmaster watches. He started reading Fratello Watches after the kind staff of the Omega Boutique in Natick, MA made him aware of our Speedy Tuesday feature. Now, we get quite a bit of e-mail per week (in all honesty it is on a daily basis) but Lawrence wrote me that he had something special. A watch that belonged to Wally Schirra, the only astronaut to have flown Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions. Wally Schirra passed away in May 2007 (age 84) and just two months before, he was […] The post Speedy Tuesday – Wally Schirra’s Gold Omega Speedmaster Professional appeared first on Fratello Watches.
My dream watch would be to some day walk into a pawnshop and find Armstrong's missing watch in a glass case for 2000 bucks.... crossing fingers
Indeed, really " The Right Stuff " and Schirra was the only astronaut to fly on Mercury, Gemini and Apollo ! Schirra also enjoyed sports cars, Austin Healy roadster, Chevrolet Corvette, Maserati 3500 GT and Maserati Bora to name a few. These Gold "Apollo 11 tribute" Speedmaster chronographs were gifted during the Astronaut Appreciation VIP dinner in the Warwick Hotel in Houston Texas on 25 November 1969. By 1972, 31 astronauts were awarded a Gold 145.012 (Apollo 1 crew posthumously) and so far we have found photos of 18 astronauts actually wearing their Gold Speedmaster. Three astronauts even wore it during NASA training (Bean, Cernan and Stafford). MoonwatchUniverse provided the NASA photo showing Walter Schirra wearing his Gold Speedmaster chronograph as he was pictured visiting the USCIAK Skylab-4 news conference in November 1973. (Photo: NASA)