Kevin Bacon wears an Omega Speedmaster

Three days before Apollo 13 left the ground in April of 1970, Jack Swigert did not have a seat on it. He was the backup command module pilot. Then Ken Mattingly was exposed to German measles, NASA pulled him, and Swigert was moved up to fly the most famous failed mission in the history of spaceflight. Ron Howard's Apollo 13 (1995) tells the story, with Kevin Bacon as Swigert, Tom Hanks as Commander Jim Lovell, Bill Paxton as Fred Haise, and Gary Sinise as the grounded Mattingly. Two days out, an oxygen tank explodes. "Houston, we've had a problem." The landing is scrubbed, and the only mission left is to bring three men home in a craft losing air, power, and heat.

The trouble that nearly killed them was geometry. The crippled spacecraft had drifted dozens of miles off course, enough to skip off the atmosphere or burn up coming in, and the fix was a manual engine burn of exactly fourteen seconds. The digital timers were dead, shut down to save power. So Swigert timed it by hand, on the chronograph of an Omega Speedmaster Professional, while Lovell flew by the line of the Earth in the window. Fourteen seconds, counted on a wristwatch, between a splashdown and a tomb.

There is a reason the watch that timed those fourteen seconds was a Speedmaster and not something else. A few years earlier, NASA had run the candidate watches through a torture rack of heat, cold, vacuum, vibration, and shock. The chronographs from Rolex and Longines-Wittnauer broke. The Omega did not, and so it became the watch the agency issued to its crews, the one already worn on the Moon, and the one that, on Apollo 13, helped bring a crew home. Most watches in most movies are wardrobe. This one is testimony.