Watches of the Mercury 7 | Breitling Navitimer Cosmonaut | Omega Speedmaster | Bulova | Heuer

The Omega Speedy Pro is famous for being the first watch worn on the moon.

However, 9 years before the Apollo flights, 7 astronauts were chosen for the Mercury Project. Today, we’ll to look at their watches.

Al Shepard won the contest to be the first man in space and piloted The Freedom 7 on 5th May 1961. He didn’t wear a watch and nor did Gus Grissom when he guided the Liberty Bell 7 to a sub orbital height of 190.4km on 21st July that year.

It was John Glenn who actually wore the first timepiece in space on 20th February, 1962 on board the Friendship 7, completing 3 earth orbits. At 20 seconds from lift off, its recoded on the mission transcript that he starts a “backup clock”. Its believed it was an Heuer stopwatch reference 2915A that Glenn was referring to.

Of course, Omega enthusiasts would not be (emphasis) over the moon hearing this, see what I did there, but Heuer are absolutely ecstatic. Omega fans say, (baby voice) it was only a stop watch, not a real watch, but of course Heuer timepieces were synonymous with motor racing and hence the timekeeper of choice for John Glenn.

Outside of the Space Missions, Glenn has a fascinating collection of watches, ranging from Hamilton, Le Coultre and Bulova.

Scott Carpenter was next in Space on the Aurora 7 on 24th May, 1962. Carpenter approached Breitling in 1961 and requested a watch with a 24 Hour Scale as a 12 hour scale would be useless given the lack of concept of night and day in space. The Navitimer Cosmonaute was delivered to Carpenter just 3 days before launch. This watch could be as famous as the Speedy had breitling not committed a marketing faux pas by calling it after Russian Cosmonautes.

The Omega Speedmaster also made it to space a good 7 years before it was the first watch on the Moon. Wally Schirra wore it on his Sigma 7 Mercury flight on October 3rd of that year when he orbited the earth 6 times. Schirra was the only Astronaut to fly on all three NASA Programs – Mercury, Gemini and Apollo and received a Gold Speedy BA145.022, also known as the Apollo 11, to mark his achievements in 1969.

Gordon Cooper also wore the CK2998 when he flew on the Faith 7 mission on May 15th, 1963, orbiting the Earth 22 times before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean. He also wore a Bulova Accutron Astronaut, worn by Nasa test pilots in 1961. Cooper manually manoeuvred the craft into reentry stating later he used his watch to time the manual burn which guided the craft out of orbit. Unfortunately, we don’t know which one he used.

In conclusion then, I loved researching this subject. We have only just examined the Mercury era of Space Exploration and we can already see that there is so much more of interest than just the Omega Moonwatch we all know and love. .

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