Dennis Quaid wears an Omega Speedmaster

Philip Kaufman directed The Right Stuff, based on Tom Wolfe's book about the Mercury Seven astronauts and the early years of the American space program. Sam Shepard plays Chuck Yeager, the test pilot who broke the sound barrier. Ed Harris is John Glenn. Fred Ward is Gus Grissom. Dennis Quaid plays Gordon Cooper, the youngest of the seven and the last to fly a solo Mercury mission. Cooper was the cocky one, a hot-rodder from Oklahoma who raced Corvettes around Cape Canaveral and irritated the other astronauts with his confidence. Quaid plays him loose and grinning, which is apparently close to the real thing.

Cooper wears an Omega Speedmaster in the film, and on the real Cooper that would have been accurate: he carried his own Speedmaster, a reference CK2998, on his Mercury flights, the same model Wally Schirra had taken into orbit in 1962 as the first Omega in space. What is anachronistic is the "Professional" on the dial. That title arrived only when NASA flight-qualified the watch in 1965, two years after Cooper's Mercury-Atlas 9 mission, so a Mercury-era Speedmaster would not yet have worn it. On screen it reads as part of Cooper's aviator persona, not as issued gear, which is how the real astronauts first came to the watch: privately, before NASA made it standard.