As the watch that accompanied NASA astronauts on their Apollo lunar missions and to the moon, the Omega Speedmaster is the most famous in this collection. But the Speedmaster got its start in space through a mundane path. In the fall of 1962, a group of astronauts went shopping for watches in Houston. Among them was Wally Schirra who bought a Speedmaster. He wore the watch on his Sigma 7 Mercury flight on October 3 of that year.

In 1964, the astronauts approached NASA requesting a watch they could reliably wear in training and on missions. Concerned that an automatic watch, energized as a side effect of wrist movement, wouldn’t be able to wind itself or keep time in a microgravity environment, the agency started testing various timepieces from Rolex, Longines, and Omega. “Testing” meant trying to destroy them as thoroughly as possible. The watches were subjected to temperatures hotter than 200 degrees fahrenheit then immediately frozen, battered in impacts generating up to 40gs, exposed to high pressure, low pressure, and humid environments, shaken, vibrated, and a placed in a highly corrosive one-hundred percent oxygen environment just like the astronauts would have on lunar missions. In the end, the watch with the highest score was the Speedmaster. Today, it remains as only one of four watches officially certified by NASA for spaceflight and the only one certified for use on spacewalks.

Its first official flight came in 1965 strapped to the wrists of Gemini 3’s Gus Grissom and John Young. The watch was also used on Apollo 11 for the first moon landing and was worn on the surface by Buzz Aldrin. It proved its worth on Apollo 13. When the crew — with their guidance computer shut down — needed to execute precision burns of their engine to adjust trajectory on their way back to Earth, they relied on Speedmasters for exact timing. This watch is still marketed as the “Moon Watch”.

In 1957, the Navy asked Bulova to design a time-keeper for its Vanguard satellite, and when it finally reached orbit it carried the first Accutron panel mount timekeeper in space. Bulova Accutrons went on to become the official time keeper for the Vanguard, Tiros, Explorer, Relay, Syncom, Pegasus, and Telstar programs, and it was the official watch of the X-15 program, the first winged vehicle to make it to the edge of space. It also became the first American made watch in space when Gordon Cooper wore one on the right side (and a Speedmaster on the left) during the last Mercury mission. While in the end NASA formally issued Omega Speedmasters to Apollo program astronauts, the panel clocks in the Lunar Module and Command Module used Accutrons.