Watches have played a vital role in humankind's exploration of the heavens, with the successful moon landing and the Omega Speedmasters worn during Apollo 11 stealing the show and dominating the narrative around watches in space. While the moon tends to get all the glory, space travel around and beyond it is just as crucial to horological legend. Exactly 60 years ago at 9:37 AM on May 5th, 1961, Alan Shepard made history when he manually piloted his Mercury spacecraft Freedom 7 in space, thus becoming the first American to achieve suborbital flight.replicas iwc The whole ordeal lasted a mere 15 minutes and 28 seconds, but its impact would set the stage for manned spaceflight for decades to come.
If there's one man who knows about watches in space, it's retired NATO officer Philip Corneille. Over the decades, he's amassed a collection of rarely seen photographs highlighting various lesser-known space watches and posted them to his Tumblr Moon Watch Universe. On the 60th anniversary of Shepard's historic flight, we've tapped Corneille to share some of his favorite photographs and the stories behind them.
In October of 2009, Cirque du Soleil CEO Guy Laliberté took up his AP on Soyuz TMA-16, destined for the Space Station. To our knowledge, it’s the watch with the highest retail price to have ever been worn in space. That's chump change compared to the 35 million dollar price tag of the trip for 10 days and 21 hours in space. In this official NASA group photo, you can spot the watch on his wrist onboard the ISS.
Serena Aunon-Chancellor was the Flight engineer on ISS Expedition 56/57. She launched on Soyuz MS-09 in 2018 and spent 196 days, 17 hours, and 49 minutes in space. This particular Seamaster model features a titanium case accented with red gold, rarely seen even within the Seamaster line. Other Seamasters have gone to space – like Mark Kelly's Planet Ocean he wore on STS-124 – but this has to be the most unusual reference.
OK, maybe we're cheating a little. This is a Speedmaster Professional, but it's not the standard Moon Watch reference. Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi made his first spaceflight onboard space shuttle Discovery during STS-114 in July 2005. On his wrist was his personal Omega Speedmaster, "From The Moon To Mars," continuing the longstanding tradition of Speedmasters in space. Noguchi made three spacewalks totaling 20 hours and five minutes over the 13-day mission.
The GMT-Master and the GMT-Master II are often associated with space, although never in an official capacity with any space programs. Instead, they’ve been popular personal watches to bring up. NASA Astronauts Lloyd Blaine Hammond and Leroy Chiao both wore their examples on a number of missions, three missions for Chiao and two for Hammond in the 1990s.
German physicist Reinhard Furrer wore his personal Sinn 140S chronograph during the STS-61A mission onboard the space shuttle Challenger. STS-61A is also known as STS-30 and D-1, with "D" denoting Deutschland. It was a "Spacelab" mission financed and operated by West Germany. Its crew of eight still holds the record for the largest crew from launch to landing on a single spacecraft.
It's right there in the name. The Accutron Astronaut was used by NASA astronauts Gordon Cooper (Mercury “Faith 7” mission in May 1963 and Gemini V in August 1965), Virgil Grissom and John Young (Gemini III in March 1965), and Norman Thagard (Space shuttle Challenger on STS-7 in June 1983). The watch was introduced in 1960, and by '61, all X-15 test pilots and the Mercury 7 NASA astronauts were issued Accutron GMT (it would later be renamed Astronaut) wristwatches on the basis that the electronic 214 tuning fork movement would stand up to the harsh environments of space capsules.
The Glycine Airman was worn by astronaut Charles ‘Pete’ Conrad on Gemini V in August 1965 and Gemini XI in September 1966. On the Gemini XI mission, because of the open cockpit design of the capsule, Conrad’s Glycine Airman was exposed to the outer space environment during the 2 hour and 41 minute spacewalk of his colleague Richard Gordon. Because of this,replicas relojes it could be said that the Glycine Airman became the first automatic wristwatch flown in and exposed to outer space.
First produced for the Soviet Air Force in 1959, these cream dial chronographs were issued to cosmonauts by 1964 and worn by the first three-man crew on Voskhod 1 in October '64. The Strela “Arrow” chronographs were worn underneath the Berkut spacesuit during the very first spacewalk by Alexei Leonov in March 1965, and on Soyuz spaceflight missions up to 1973.
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