Needed chrono. Needed chrono. Needed chrono. Otherwise, outside pressure strength (water resistance) is the opposite of what is needed. Dive bezel not accurate enough when timing burns.

 

Sounds like there were no diver chrono's in the 1960s

Where can i get a Bracelet like that? Thanks.

Made close to home

Forstner Bands

The source for classic vintage-inspired stainless steel watch bracelets, including the original astronaut bracelet, the Komfit/JB Champion-style expandable mesh band.

forstnerbands.com

 

I don't think there were any water resistant chronographs back then.

Another thought: the pressure differential between the air inside the watch and space could potentially cause the crystal to pop out so an air/water-tight seal probably wouldn't work.

 

Searched without luck, asked elsewhere without luck...

Wouldn't a true dive watch with screw-down crown make more sense for lunar astronauts, given the high-G environments, water landings, and fine Moon dust that gets into everything?

Launch accelerations:

View attachment 15728412

Moon dust problem: click for article

View attachment 15728433

Re-entry accelerations:

View attachment 15728425

Landing (splashdown):

View attachment 15728437

Disclaimer This isn't a Moonwatch hate post. I love mine, especially since I bought it in the Rocket City in July 2019

View attachment 15728442

Where can i get a Bracelet like that? Thanks.

 

Looks like the "Komfit" mesh bracelet. I'd put one on my to-buy list if I get my own Speedy.

Forstner Bands

The source for classic vintage-inspired stainless steel watch bracelets, including the original astronaut bracelet, the Komfit/JB Champion-style expandable mesh band.

forstnerbands.com

 

The astronauts weren't supposed to end up in the ocean! That was never part of the plan so would not have been included in the specs.

Now that everyone has a smart phone, it's easy to forget what a valuable tool a chronograph was. I believe there was a Mercury mission that was saved by an astronaut timing burns with his chronograph, although the details escape me. I am sure Google would remember.

 

I believe there was a Mercury mission that was saved by an astronaut timing burns with his chronograph, although the details escape me. I am sure Google would remember.

I don't know about this happening in any Mercury missions (checking now), but the most famous one was Apollo 13 timing a mid-course correction burn by referencing their Speedy.

 

NASA put a whole series of chronograph watches through a battery of tests considering things like temperature changes and shifts. The Speedmaster did it all. It was literally the perfect watch for the job. Note that only chronographs were considered.

 

Well, not perfect (that's why the Alaska Project was started), but the best there was. It also helped the astronauts preferred the Speedmaster over all the others when they weren't told of the results.

This would be why Carpenter's Navitimer made more sense even though it got flooded upon splashdown.

I suspect the Navitimer would've been nixed because it's too busy of a dial to read. Remember you may be in freefall and focusing on a small watch was already hard, much less see read the small dials in all that ink. Though they didn't know it then, the fact that your vision goes bad in zero G makes this even more important. I suspect many other watches could qualify now, but why bother when Omega probably gives them a good price on the Speedmaster and helps fund projects and gives NASA a big public profile? Why dump the golden goose?

 

Any "G" that would've affected any watch would've turned the astronauts to soup long before

 

The max G in the launch appears to have been around 3-4 G. That's simple for a fighter pilot And a watch.

 

Scott's crystal popped off on his speedy, something that alot of fan's seem to forget, or just plain ignore. Might have been the first omega on the moon, but a failed omega at that. I'm not bashing the watch, i hope to add one to the collection in the future, it's just a fact that some would rather forget, or omit.

 

Charlie Duke had problems with his too.

 

I did myself always wonder why they didn’t use something with a sliding rule ala navitimer. I would assume it was tested and failed. It would be interesting to see all of what was actually tested and what failed and how.

 

I did myself always wonder why they didn't use something with a sliding rule ala navitimer. I would assume it was tested and failed. It would be interesting to see all of what was actually tested and what failed and how.

From: nasa test documents speedmaster cosmograph

NASA Testing Regime for the Omega Speedmaster Moonwatch

www.twentytwoten.com

Omega Speedmaster: The Space Watch Tested by NASA | Bob's Watches

The Omega Speedmaster is the official watch of NASA, but what tests did it have to pass to become certified for space flight and EVA? Read on to find out.

www.bobswatches.com

From The Archives: How The Omega Speedmaster Became The Moonwatch

✓ On July 21st, 1969, mankind set foot on the Moon ✓ Read why the Omega Speedmaster Professional Moonwatch accompanied the astronauts here! ✓

www.fratellowatches.com

I've also seen an upload of PDF scans of all the testing documentation, but I don't remember which site was hosting it.

And a story describing how Shuttle astronaut Dr. Donald Pettit repaired a Speedmaster to demonstrate that it would be possible to repair container boxes even though they had loose screws (up to that point, the standing recommendation was that only captive screws were safe in a weightless environment).

Donald R. Pettit Oral History

The method of changing Mission Control (Center) into this was something that Sox and I worked on on Expedition 6. We would have failures, no spare parts because Shuttles weren't flying, and we would suggest, "Well, we could take the box apart."

It was like, "No, no, the box wasn't designed to take apart. The screws are loose, they're not captive." Up to that point, if you took something apart, the screw had to be captive. If the screw would actually come out as a separate piece, which almost everything is down here, that was considered impossible to repair on orbit because you might have a lid that was fastened down with 27 screws, and how could you handle 27 loose screws in a weightless environment. The idea that we were bulls in the china closet, and we couldn't do anything that involved dealing with lots of pieces and any kind of dexterity.

So, what happened was my Omega (SA) Speedmaster watch broke, and it turned out it was a common failure at that time. We had three Omega Speedmasters break with the same thing. The buttons that control it fell off, and then it had the crown, which is a little stem that you can control it. It fell off, and it was basically useless. I decided to take my Omega Speedmaster apart and fix it.

I've had a fair amount of experience doing watch repair here on Earth, and I figured, well, I can do this on orbit. So, I took my watch apart and I filmed the whole thing, and then I put it back together, and it worked. I downlinked that video with the idea of just demonstrating to people that we could do the epitome of fine dexterous work involving dozens of little tiny parts, and we could do this in a weightless environment. After that video was downlinked, then we started to see repair requests come up, taking boxes apart with the 27 loose non-captive screws, and opening things up and taking them apart at the subcomponent level.

​

 

Also, the stock Omega bracelet wasn't suitable for training, hence the Komfit bracelet.

Hands-on: the new Forstner "Komfit" JB mesh bracelet

RJ gives the Forstner "Komfit" JB mesh bracelet a try. A wonderful ($125USD) alternative to the original JB NASA bracelet.

www.fratellowatches.com

 

NASA specifically wanted a chronograph, . . . see below link that has the spec requirements that NASA passed to the listed manufacturers they solicited to offer up watches. The Speedy outperformed a whole lot of big brand names.

NASA Testing Regime for the Omega Speedmaster Moonwatch

 

They weren't diving is my guess.

 

They did land in water. They did face some "shock" loading. And I propose a screw-down crown would keep out dust.

 

@belia beat me to it.

It's like any of the Apollo hardware - there were specs they wanted, and asked contractors to comply as much as possible. Most famous among them would probably be ILC Dover (International Latex Products), who used their research in reusable nylon pantyhose as the basis for the materials that would become the EMUs.

Also keep in mind that most of what they did for the first three US space programs (Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, including ASTP/Skylab) was to keep cost down by providing NASA with "single use" assets. Proof of this can be seen in the preservation work that has gone into the Apollo EMUs, for example, which has been painstaking because they are in a near perpetual state of decay. This is deliberate. Look up how the Smithsonian spent YEARS upkeeping and restoring Armstrong's EMU. Same thing with their watches; the pilots did not need waterproof watches to fulfill the mission's operational objectives. If their watch ever touched water during those missions, that means only one of two things: 1) The mission was aborted after launch, and the pilot has much bigger problems on his hands than knowing what time it is, or 2) the mission is effectively over, as he spills out of the capsule and into the sea or the life raft. So waterproofing would have just been an unnecessary request to make, and would have added cost and/or increased production times and cause potential delays (which they had aplenty, viz. the lunar module).

As far as the surface of the moon, Dave Scott's problem with his Omega is well-documented, but it's on record that a few others also had problems, I believe Charlie Duke being one of them. And Armstrong didn't want to take his to the surface, again, because he understood the nature of all the hardware around him - single use - so he left his in the LM while Aldrin carried his onto the surface. They didn't want both Omegas potentially failing on the surface, so that's why he left his inside.

 

My head would explode trying to wrap around the concept of a “single use Omega watch.” But that does explain why lunar dust wasn’t a concern. Ditto for water, which wouldn’t be a factor until the end of the mission anyway.

And the G-forces were benign enough not to need a more rugged watch.

Sounds like there was no need for a dive watch then... a WUS Public thread that delivered in just two pages, wow!

 

My head would explode trying to wrap around the concept of a "single use Omega watch."

That's 'cuz you don't have NASA's budget

 

no swimming or bodies of water?

 

Wouldn't a true dive watch with screw-down crown make more sense for lunar astronauts, given the high-G environments, water landings, and fine Moon dust that gets into everything?

1. High-G isn't a big part of diving. It's more common in aviation, where professional chronographs were already becoming the standard

2. The water landing happens AFTER the mission. The worst that happens is that you lose a Speedmaster - which might seem a big deal normally, but isn't even a rounding error on the cost of a Saturn 5 launch

3. Fine dust is common in many environments where watches are used. A reasoable case and crown keep it out of the mechanism. Pre g-shock field watches typically only had 30m WR

4. They needed a chrongraph as a navigation backup tool.

 

Grissom went into the water in 1961.

NASA certainly knew the Apollo watch might get wet.

As has been said, at the end of the mission the watch didn't matter.

 

Of course NASA knew the watch might get wet. It's right there in the request specs --

"5. The chronograph must be shockproof, waterproof, and anti-magnetic. In addition, the face cover must be shatterproof."

This back-and-forth about oh-my-god-but-didn't-you-know-they-splashed-into-the-ocean is just stupid.

 

The original question was "why not a dive watch?"

 

At least we didn't issue our cosmonauts this...

 

 

Comparing a dust molecule to a water molecule is like comparing a boulder to a grain of sand. Any WR means it is impervious to dust ingress.

 

I don't get all this argument about water resistance. Here's the deal, you need a chrono. Water resistance is nice, but does not matter if you do have a chrono. That's like saying "I need a hulu girl for the dash in my car" when you don't have a car. It's nice if your equipment is reusable AFTER the mission, but it's more important it works DURING the mission. A Submariner that can survive the ocean is useless when you need to time 14 seconds or you'll die. And NASA in the 50s and 60s was not the paragon of reusing equipment.

 

Funny I was thinking along the same lines when everyone was so concerned about it getting wet after splashdown. The whole point I would think would be to make it till you splashed down. At that point who cares about anything besides getting on something more solid than whatever three landed in.

 

I don't know. Is there any water on the moon?
Joe

 

My thoughts on this is water resistance is the ability of the seals to hold against pressure and there’s not a whole lot of it in space.

 

My thoughts on this is water resistance is the ability of the seals to hold against pressure and there's not a whole lot of it in space.

There is not much pressure to hold even if you swimming. Any 30m WR watch will hold fine if it's a good one.
25m WR used to be advertised by Timex (Marlin) as go have fun with watch strapped to propeller of motorboat thing.
Obviously it was before whole race to my WR is bigger became a marketing technique.

 

Searched without luck, asked elsewhere without luck...

Wouldn't a true dive watch with screw-down crown make more sense for lunar astronauts, given the high-G environments, water landings, and fine Moon dust that gets into everything?

Launch accelerations:

View attachment 15728412

Moon dust problem: click for article

View attachment 15728433

Re-entry accelerations:

View attachment 15728425

Landing (splashdown):

View attachment 15728437

Disclaimer This isn't a Moonwatch hate post. I love mine, especially since I bought it in the Rocket City in July 2019

View attachment 15728442

because no water on the moon

 

I spose they thought once they were actually bobbing around in the Pacific most of the hazards were behind them.

Pretty dry in space and on the moon though? So not sure WR would really Enter the thinking?

 

Besides WR for ocean landings, dive watches are more shock-resistant and have screw-down crowns. The former covers ascent and descent, the latter for Moon dust. This was why I asked the question.