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Amazon.com Product Description
Add a true classic to your timepiece collection with the latest generation of the amazingly precise and rugged Omega Speedmaster. This stainless steel manual winding men’s watch is a replica of the first watch worn on the moon, and it’s engraved on the back with the Omega Speedmaster emblem and notation of its flight qualification for all NASA manned space missions. It includes a powerful chronograph, which offers 12-hour, 30 minute and 1/10 second subdials. Distinctively masculine in design, it features a large, round silver stainless steel watch case with a tachymeter bezel in black with silver markings, and it measures 42mm (1.65 inches) wide.

It has a black dial background with black subdials, silver-tone hands, and thin silver baton dial markers as well as small minute indexes. Other features include a scratch-resistant and glare-proofed domed sapphire crystal, and water resistance to 30 meters (100 feet). It’s completed by a silver stainless steel link bracelet band that offers polished highlights, which is joined by a secure, push-button clasp.

The Omega Story
The Omega watch story begins in 1848, when founder Louis Brandt began hand assembling key-wound precision pocket watches from parts supplied by local craftsmen in his principality La Chaux-de-Fonds, in the northwest corner of Switzerland. However, the Omega name didn’t appear until 1894, after Louis Brandt had passed away and his watchmaking traditions were taken over by his sons, Louis-Paul and Cesar Brandt. Omega watches have long been associated with glamorous screen and sports stars–the Omega Seamaster is famous for being the watch of choice for James Bond–with current ambassadors including Pierce Brosnan, Nicole Kidman, tennis player Anna Kournikova, and swimmers Michael Phelps and Ian Thorpe.

But Omega is more than just a fashionable watch. In 1965, the Omega Speedmaster chronograph was “flight-qualified by NASA for all manned space missions” as the only wristwatch to have withstood all of the U.S. space agency’s severe tests, including passing grades for extreme shocks, vibrations, and temperatures ranging from -18 to +93 degrees Celsius. The greatest moment in the Speedmaster’s history was undoubtedly 20 July 1969 at 02:56 GMT, when it recorded man’s first steps on the Moon’s surface as part of the Apollo 11 mission. Today, Omega is known for its rigorous testing of new movements, cases, and bands. Each new Omega movement is tested on the wrist in existing Omega models, while various laboratory tests are conducted to determine temperature-resistance, shock-resistance and vibration-resistance.

Customer Reviews

30 Year Review
After much research, I purchased an Omega Speedmaster in 1968 as an 18th birthday present to myself. There were not many chronographs available at that time (Rolex, Breitling, Omega and probably others I no longer remember). To my surprise, that summer (or next), Omega began agressive advertising that it’s watch was the official timepiece of the Apollo Astronauts. It reaffirmed my choice. Thirty years later, it is still the best watch I own (including my Submariner). My only complaint is that I have gone through three or four bracelets/straps. Ironically, a new metal bracelet costs more than the original cost of my Speedmaster ($185). Interestingly, no Rolex owner has ever commented on my Submariner, but fellow Speedmaster owners always start up a conversation with each other. I cannot comment on the new Speedmasters, but mine has been dropped, thrown, drowned, frozen, heated, shaken and abused for 30 years and still runs great. I recommend factory cleaning, vacuum sealing and a new crystal every 10 years or so, just to be safe.

My last watch
When I graduated from college in 1966, my parents gave me a fine very slim gold Swiss watch. It didn’t last a month in the Amazon. The stainless automatic Seiko I bought at the PX in Vietnam was stolen out of my car. Then I bought my last watch, the Omega Speedmaster Professional.

I was half way through law school when I bought it at Al’s Pawn Shop in Nashville in 1974 for about $125, the most I could afford. A year later my wife gave me a tooled silver bracelet watch band for my birthday. It’s the only watch I have worn since.

It has always been amazingly accurate. When it quits because I forgot to wind it, that means I have been too busy and I try to slow down. As a litigator, I use the stop watch function frequently to time my work. When it finally wore out after some 25 years, I sent it to an expert near Seattle I located online and he put it back into like new shape…for five times what I had paid for it.

In 1997 I saw the same watch in a store window in Geneva. I made a note of the price in Swiss francs and later calculated it cost around $3500 in US dollars. That’s when I realized my treasured watch had probably been stolen and fenced at Al’s Pawn Shop all those years before. Until then I had thought I was merely the beneficiary of a man down on his luck who needed money to get home.

To see the exact same watch on the wrist of the space suit at the Huntsville Space Museum and playing a critical role in the movie, Apollo 13, gives me a funny sense of pride at my uncanny good luck to have a watch I will never replace at such a low price. On a subconscious level I hope the satisfaction the watch has given me for these past 30+ years is somehow sensed by the owner from whom it was stolen and he is pleased. Especially since he had it adequately insured.

Since 1983…
Bought in 1983 for about 800 bucks. It’s a little heavy, but it is so beautiful. I wear it 5 - 10 times / month. One new crystal needed in 1998. No work on the mechanical movement, ever.

Worn by Michael Schumacher and Michael Crichton, to name a few.

An old Swiss friend told me (back in 1983) that you look at your watch 30 - 100 times a day–why not have a beauty (he had a Patek Phillipe).

Consider it a 20 year investment.

Buy Omega Men’s Speedmaster Professional Watch #3570.50