During the late 1950s, the human race developed a taste for building huge, powerful, rockets, and launching them into outer space. Exciting stuff, for sure, but made much more exciting, when on April 12 1961, Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin was strapped into one of these rockets, and became the first human being to travel into space. Wearing a 17-jewel Sturmanskie watch on his wrist. Now, the 17-jewel Sturnmanskie may not be on the wish list of many collectors, however its use by Gagarin in Vostok 1, earns it a place on the register of watches in space. This is a theoretical register, as far as I know, but were it to be beautifully presented in hardback form, preferably, with lots of lovely photographs, you could assume, it would contain a great deal of black dialed, hand wound, triple register chronographs, with the greek symbol for Omega on their dial. Tucked in between all of those Swiss made 321, 861, and 1861 calibre chronographs, you’d find timepieces from all manner of brands, containing all kinds of tech - tuning fork watches of various flavours, brightly coloured automatic chronographs, cheap, cheerful, robust, and accurate digital watches, dressy chronographs that you’d never expect to see in an industrial situation, pilots watches with complicated slide rules on their dial, and a whole host of coronet adorned divers and GMTs. There are so many watches that have been worn in space, that someone really could write a book on the subject. But that’s perhaps a task for another day. Today, we’re suiting up, strapping in, and launching ourselves into a very brief history of watches in space. Listen Now.
+1, really informative and articulate. Nice to see you again Chris at the Sotheby’s preview the other day too, I hope you won the Sapphire bezelled GMT. Ben
Thanks Ben! You too - I can confirm that no bids were placed on lairy precious metal Rolex. Can you imagine if I'd won, and then had to sell my house to pay for it?!
I really had a great time with Time4aPint and enjoyed meeting Chris again, who is very passionate about time pieces and spaceflight as well. Also loved his Omega Flightmaster ! Time flew by and we could have talked another hour, messed a few things up said 75 instead of 57 for the first space mission and watches where I meant gloves can only be used on one mission... Didn't realze I have a stopword... That's correct, used a dozen times The pictures turned out superb... Thanks again !!! Edit: thanks to @TLIGuy we now know that Scott Altman did wear several Rolex watches on Atlantis STS-125 in 2009 https://omegaforums.net/threads/198...ulley-rolex-daytona-6263.100741/#post-1334120
Apologies for not having listened (yet), but I hope what Joe Walker was wearing for his pair of flights over 62 miles in the X-15 were included in the list. Update: Bill Dana and Jack McKay were also awarded wings for their flights, although not technically above the (somewhat arbitrary) 62 mile boundary. No idea what any of them were wearing.
@jsducote Take a look at the archive of https://moonwatchuniverse.tumblr.com/archive As we take a look into early test pilots' wristwatches... MoonwatchUniverse isn't solely about Omega .
Once more, if anyone is interested in a particular photo shown on the photoblog, don't hesitate to PM me and I'll e-mail the best High Res scan I have available... .
I would like to thank some forum-members who gave friendly feedback... Here's a free online NASA SP publication about the early NACA & current day NASA test pilots: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/emblems-of-exploration-tagged.pdf
I really enjoyed this podcast - so much detail and many topics which would be interesting separate discussions - I might even break my Omega only moto and look for an Accutron. @SpeedyPhill - Thanks for sharing your knowledge and I am pleased we managed to meet up in London last month. I enjoyed our conversation and we will have to build in some more time.... next time :0) I also hope to get to Time 4A pint in November - my diary is not doing me any favours this year :0(
Well the idea for a book mentioned at the beginning of the podcast might be "in the works" ... something with Cold War, Hot Watches, Space, etc...