Review: Omega Speedmaster Moonwatch Apollo 11 50th Anniversary

There are many Omegas, and many of them are Speedmasters. Of those Speedmasters, many are Moonwatches and of all the Moonwatches, a significant amount are special editions for the Apollo program. Not only is this one of them, but it’s also the coolest Omega you can get today. Here are three reasons why.

Is there anything more late-sixties, early-seventies cool than brown and gold? Like Rolex’s GMT-Master II CHNR, this Omega Speedmaster Apollo 11 50th Anniversary takes that same distinctly warm colour palette and transforms what is usually a very stark and functional watch into something completely different.

And the difference is apparent all the way down to the details. This isn’t just a Speedmaster with a gold case and bracelet and a brown bezel—for the £26,480 asking price, Omega has really gone to town with it in a way befitting the achievements of Messrs Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins.

We can start with the gold itself. It’s not just plain, ole’ 18-carat gold, no, that would be too boring. It’s what Omega calls “Moonshine” gold instead. No, it’s not gold that’s been smuggled in the back of a car and sold at a speakeasy; it’s still 18-carat, still gold, but its alloyed with a few secret ingredients to give it just the merest touch of red. It’s so warm you could melt chocolate on it.

Which is exactly what it looks like Omega has done for the bezel, because the inlay isn’t just anodised aluminium like the standard watch, it’s lovely, glossy ceramic. The numerals are not just printed on, they’re laser-engraved into the ceramic and filled flush with gold—unlike Rolex’s recessed dirt traps.

The Omega Speedmaster was first introduced in 1957, 12 years before the moon-landing

And the gold bleeds further into the watch, because the dial itself, plus the hands, markers and even the logo, are all hewn from the same Moonshine gold. If you ever need to prove it, it even says so just above the centre hand stack.

But this is no instrument built for wearing in high-stakes environments; this is a piece of jewellery to have hanging loosely from the wrist, and so the luminous paint in the markers makes way for contrasting black details, fashioned exclusively from the glassy mineral onyx.

The front is pretty cool in a laid back, let’s-not-force-the-moon-landing-thing-down-people’s-throats kind of way. But it is a Moonwatch after all, and so this timepiece couldn’t get away without mentioning it—but when it does, it does so in style.

Before we get to that, though, we need to find it, and it’s on the back that we do. You almost don’t notice anything other than the immense eye candy that is the calibre 3861, a thoroughly modern, hand wound mechanical chronograph—if there can be such a thing. It gets chronometer certification, it gets a free-sprung balance with silicon coil, antimagnetic to 15,000 gauss—oh yes, and it’s plated up to the eyeballs in gold.

The Omega Speedmaster was fist introduced as a sports and racing chronograph

If there was ever a way to make a movement look even more impressive—and F.P. Journe knows this—it’s with gold. And by dipping all the plates in the stuff, it leaves the many monochrome levers and screws standing in contrast against them, making it easier to appreciate the workings of the mechanism and try to understand how it all works—and there’s no better format to try and figure out a chronograph than a horizontal clutch, manual wind movement like this one.

As for the Anniversary thing, it almost disappears under the glow of all that moonshine, but it’s there around the outside. You’ve got the anniversary date range in red, opposite the limited number of 1,014—weird number, we’ll get to that later—but it’s the ring inside of that we’re really interested in. Between all the usual stuff about anniversaries and the being the first watch on the moon, there’s a depiction of two worlds: ours and our satellite, the moon.

Our world is nicely depicted in blue and gold on one side, but it’s the moon that demands a second look. It’s not a picture, like the Earth is, it’s a piece of rock—a piece of rock that came from the moon, no less. Known as a lunar meteorite, the fragment was torn away from the moon by one of the many impacts that gives our orbital neighbour its characteristic pattern. Never mind the cherry on the cake—it’s the moon on the Moonwatch.

So yeah, it’s a pretty cool watch, but you might be wondering where Omega got the idea to dress up a Speedmaster in an outfit that hasn’t been on trend since the middle of last century. Well, here’s the coolest part of all—this isn’t the first Omega to look like this.

Omega beat out rival Rolex in the race to become the official moonwatch

In 1969, after the successful first landings on the moon—which, you may have heard, also made the Omega Speedmaster the first watch worn on the moon—Omega decided to celebrate with a run of very special Speedmasters limited to just—you guessed it—1,014 pieces.

Several were given to the astronauts, one to the President, and the rest were distributed to the public. This watch too had the gold case, bracelet and dial, onyx markers and burgundy bezel, exactly like the modern version, which makes this new one the perfect send off to the last fifty years between the moon landings and now.

And so many of the little details from that watch make it into this one here. The arrangement of the bezel is as it was late sixties, the applied logo as well. Even the tiny little “OM” print either side of “Swiss Made”—standing for “Or Massif”, or solid gold—is carried over from that original, a detail that no one—except you lot, obviously—is going to ever notice.

So what could be cooler than not only having a Moonwatch with a real piece of moon in it, or one made out of gold with laser-etched ceramic and layered with onyx, or one with an evolution of that original movement with all the modern frills, than one that not only honours the 50th anniversary of the moon landings, but the 50th anniversary of the watch given to the astronauts as well.

Never mind all the Apollo business, the Moonshine Omega Speedmaster 50th Anniversary is just out and out the coolest watch Omega has for sale right now. It’s not cheap, but it does somehow manage to take an iconic piece of watchmaking design and completely refresh it—even if it is in clothes that have been in the closet since the 1960s.

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