Bill Paxton wears an Omega Speedmaster

Fred Haise was supposed to walk on the Moon. Bill Paxton plays him in Ron Howard's Apollo 13 (1995), and in the mission the film recreates, Haise is the lunar module pilot, the man set to climb down the ladder after Jim Lovell and become the sixth human being to stand on another world. Then, two days out, the oxygen tank blew, and the landing was gone. What was left was getting home: four days in a powered-down ship that fell to thirty-eight degrees, its walls slick with condensation, with Haise feverish almost the whole way from a kidney infection.

On Haise's wrist, visible as he raises an instrument to his eye in the dark, is an Omega Speedmaster Professional. NASA issued it to its crews after a round of torture testing that broke the chronographs from Rolex and Longines-Wittnauer and left the Omega standing, and by 1970 it had already been worn on the surface of the Moon. The Speedmaster was built and certified to work on that surface, and on Apollo 13 it rode all the way out, around the far side of the Moon and home again, on the wrist of a man who had trained to walk there. On his only voyage to the Moon, neither the watch nor the man touched the ground they came for.