Professional 145.022-69

There are a total of 1014 of these watches, #1 was offered to President Nixon and #2 was offered to Vice President Spiro Agnew. Both declined the watch though, for compliance reasons. During a banquet on the 25th of November 1969, 19 watches were offered to the NASA astronauts. Later on, other astronauts who couldn’t join the banquet or who did later missions (than 1969) also received their gold piece. This watch has the engraving “to mark man’s conquest of space with time, through time, on time.” A quote that Jim Lovell also gave during a Q&A session at the Speedmaster Event in Houston last May. There seems to be a bit of an uncertainty whether Apollo 13’s Jack Swigert and Fred Haise received one, but I’ve been told that they were offered one later on as well. However, they do not appear in any overviews of the watches given to astronauts. A number of watches (with another type of engraving) went to some Swiss managers of Omega and Lemania at the time.

Read the whole article written by our friends of Fratello Watches.