Omega’s “Moonwatch” – the black and white chronograph otherwise known as the Speedmaster Professional – is one of a handful of watches that may be considered a bona fide design icon.
It inspires fanboy devotion, a day named in its honour (‘Speedy Tuesdays’) and hotly contested debate over which model number, or reference, is king. And, of course, it comes with a money-can’t-buy PR backstory – worn during the first American spacewalk as part of NASA’s Gemini 4 mission and worn on the Moon during the Apollo 11 mission, an event watched by 600 million people from Earth.
But it has also created something of backlash.
You could fill a very big book with the umpteen “Speedys” Omega has released in the intervening six decades – indeed, several exist.
Its detractors accuse Omega of relying too heavily on its position as its hero product and dining out on its lunar history too often – and anyway, it wasn’t even intended for space! As its name suggests the Speedmaster was a road-racing chronograph, introduced after its companions the Seamaster and the Railmaster.
Although the Speedmaster line does include other models – it has partnered with the European Space Agency (ESA) on a line of “instruments” for pilots and crewmembers knows as the Skywalker, or X-33 – is it the “Moonwatch” that dominates, remaining one of few watches qualified by NASA for spaceflight, and the only one qualified for spacewalks.
Well, 2022 may be remembered as the year Omega took the Speedmaster beyond the Moon.
In March there was the internet-smashing, high-street-shuttering, eBay-bothering Omega x Swatch Speedmaster collection, in which the £6,000 Moonwatch was rendered in £200 plastic (sorry, bioceramic!) across 11 coloured different models, each inspired by different planets and celestial bodies – including Jupiter, Saturn, Pluto, Venus and, yes, yes, Uranus.
Now comes news of the Speedmaster’s latest giant leap – to Mars.
The Speedmaster X-33 Marstimer has again been designed in collaboration with ESA and is a watch designed to track time both on Earth and on Mars.
The 45mm chronograph combines analogue and digital displays and will read MTC – Mean Solar Time at Mars’s prime meridian. Since, as every schoolboy knows, a Martian day is 39 minutes longer than a day down here.
There’s also a solar compass, to find true north on both planets and applications such as MET (Mission Elapsed Time) and PET (Phase Elapsed Time) that had previously appeared on three generations of the Skywalker X-33. There’s also a perpetual calendar and various (loud!) alarm functions.
You navigate through the functions using the crown. Switching between Earth time and Mars time is easy enough – you press and hold for three seconds. A symbol on the dial then indicates whether it’s Earth time or Mars time. Meanwhile four pushers trigger different functions within a specific “program”
The watch is cased in grade 2 titanium and has a red oxalic anodised aluminium bezel, in tribute to the Red Planet. It is powered by something Omega describes as a “highly precise thermo-compressed quartz movement” capable of handling the multiple analogue and digital functions.
With interest in space at its highest point in years – talk of colonising Mars by 2050 abounds, fashion companies are falling over themselves to design space-themed clothing, while NASA is busy colliding satellites into asteroids at 14,000-miles-per-hour, thus successfully testing planetary defence technology – Omega’s timing couldn’t be better.
“Anyone interested in space, or even science fiction, is obsessed with Mars,” says Omega’s president and CEO, Raynald Aeschlimann. “It has generated so much curiosity, so many incredible stories. It’s so close yet so far. We long to walk across its surface. To be here on Earth and be able to track its movements, gives the term ‘timepiece’ a whole new meaning. I’m thrilled with this new addition to the famous Speedmaster family.”
If nothing else, it will give the ‘Moonwatch’ haters something else to think about.
The Speedmaster X-33 Marstimer is available now; CHF 5,900 omegawatches.com
