Louis Brandt set up a watchmaking workshop in La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1848. His sons, Louis-Paul and César, moved the firm to Bienne in 1880 and industrialised the manufacture of interchangeable parts — the first watchmaker in Switzerland to do so. In 1894 they launched a calibre of unprecedented chronometric precision and named it the Omega. The watch sold so well that, by 1903, the brothers had renamed the entire firm after it.
The watch that went to the Moon
In 1962, NASA was looking for an off-the-shelf chronograph that could survive the conditions of a spaceflight. The agency bought watches anonymously from a Houston jeweller and put them through a punishing battery of tests: extreme cold, extreme heat, decompression, acceleration, vibration, vacuum. Of the entrants — including Rolex, Longines and Hamilton — only the Omega Speedmaster Professional, reference 105.003, survived all of them. It was flight-qualified for all manned space missions in March 1965.
It was strapped to Ed White's wrist for the first American spacewalk in June 1965. It was strapped to Buzz Aldrin's wrist when the Lunar Module landed in the Sea of Tranquility on 20 July 1969. Aldrin, by his own later account, left his Speedmaster inside the LM as a backup when the onboard clock began to fail; Neil Armstrong, standing on the lunar surface, was therefore the first man to walk on the Moon without a watch. The Speedmaster has been worn on every American manned space mission from Mercury onwards. NASA still owns Aldrin's. The watch was on the wrist when the explosion crippled Apollo 13, and was used to time the crucial 14-second mid-course burn that brought the astronauts home.
"It was the only thing on board that I knew, absolutely, would work."
The four references that matter
- The Speedmaster Professional Moonwatch (ref. 145.012, 1967) — the watch worn on the Moon. The current 3861 movement is still hand-wound, still Lemania-derived, and still NASA-qualified for EVA.
- The Seamaster 300 (ref. CK2913, 1957) — Omega's reply to the Submariner. Worn by Pierce Brosnan, Daniel Craig, and every Bond since GoldenEye.
- The Constellation (1952) — the chronometer-rated dress watch of the 1960s. The "pie-pan" dial remains one of horology's loveliest details.
- The Speedmaster Apollo 11 50th Anniversary (2019) — moonshine gold, a perfect modern tribute. Already a collector piece.
The Bond era
From 1962 to 1989, James Bond wore a Rolex Submariner. In 1995, Pierce Brosnan strapped on an Omega Seamaster for GoldenEye, and a deal was struck that has now lasted thirty-one years and seven Bond films. The marketing partnership has been one of the most successful brand alignments in modern luxury — and, more importantly, it gave Omega a sports watch with the cultural weight to take on the Submariner directly.
In the 2026 secondary market, the Speedmaster Moonwatch remains one of the most liquid and consistently appreciating mechanical watches in the world. The recent Apollo-themed limited editions have outperformed even Rolex sports references in collector demand. The Bloomberg index has Omega up 13 per cent in February 2026 alone — one of the strongest single-month moves in the entire mid-tier sector. The brand, for the first time in two decades, is being taken absolutely seriously again.