After nabbing six Academy Awards for La La Land, director Damien Chazelle and actor Ryan Gosling have teamed up once again, this time tackling the real-life tale of Neil Armstrong and NASA’s historic Apollo 11 space flight, the first manned mission to the moon, in First Man. The riveting film, which hit Hong Kong theatres last Thursday, also features the first-ever watch worn to the moon – the Omega Speedmaster.
Back in 1964, NASA put several top-tier timepieces through a series of harrowing tests to in the hopes of finding a worthy watch for its astronauts. Of the lot, only the Omega Speedmaster survived, establishing it as the official timepiece for all manned-missions and kickstarting a decades-long partnership with the Swiss watchmaker that has lasted to this very day.
Since then, Omega has supplied watches for all NASA’s Human Space Flight Program projects, including the Gemini, Apollo, Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz missions and currently outfits the International Space Station. For First Man, Omega supplied several period-accurate watches the Omega Speedmaster ST 105.012, the famous Moonwatch worn by Apollo 11 astronauts during the historic lunar landing.