To The Moon And Back

Fifty years on, the Omega Speedmaster – the first and only timepiece to be worn on the moon – celebrates the achievement of humankind’s first lunar steps.

- Kenneth Tan

On 16 July 1969, Apollo 11 Saturn V launched into space from Kennedy Space Centre, Florida. The mission, bound for the moon, would take four more days before the Eagle landing module finally touched down on Tranquillity Base. What followed is the stuffof legend: the first human footprint on the moon and Buzz Aldrin’s unforgettable description of the moonscape as a “magnificent desolation”, subsequently doing two-footed kangaroo hops while wearing his Omega Speedmaster (commander Neil Armstrong’s had been left in the cockpit).

Fifty years on, back at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Kennedy Space Center and under the shadow of the 110m Saturn V rocket, a constellation of living heroes gathered at Omega’s Golden Moments dinner to commemorate the golden anniversary of the first mission to the moon. Among them was Thomas Stafford, an astronaut on Apollo 10 – a reconnaissance mission which came as close as 14km from the moon’s surface in a lunar module. Also in attendance was Charles Duke, the capcom (capsule communicator) for the crew of Apollo 11 (NASA reasoned that it would be easier for one astronaut to communicate to another). Duke would later make his own slice of history, becoming the 10th man and youngest person to walk on the moon. Another NASA luminary that evening was senior aerospace engineer James Ragan, whose 36-year NASA career saw him assume responsibilities which included selecting, testing and preparing flight crew hardware for the earlier Gemini programmes, through to Apollo, Skylab and ASTP, as well as supporting the space shuttle programmes.

Academy Award-winner and Omega’s ambassador George Clooney, who was present among the assembly of guests, hailed “the madness of optimism” from those halcyon days which successfully landed a man on the moon, a mere eight years after the challenge was first issued by President John F Kennedy.