Guess what? It’s another MoonSwatch — but this isn’t just another colorway. The new drop from the Switzerland-based watchmaker, the MoonSwatch Mission to the Moon 1969, is the first to use real gold across the dial, hands, crown, and pushers.
The watch marks the anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on July 21, 1969.
There are 11 grams of Omega’s 18K Moonshine Gold in each piece, which isn’t a coincidence. Swatch Group owns Omega, so the two brands share a corporate roof, a foundry, and, apparently, a scrap-metal bin.
If you’re not a space geek, though, there’s another hook: it only costs about $625.
That’s a watch with 11 grams of gold in it, priced roughly to what that gold cost back then; 11 grams of 18K gold ran about $11. Swatch pegged the price to the historical rate rather than today’s, where gold alone would run many times that.
The gold isn’t just period-priced, it’s period-sourced. Swatch says it melted down old Omega spare parts dating to 1969 in its own foundry to make the Moonshine Gold.
The case is the familiar 42mm matte black Bioceramic shell, with a gold-colored tachymeter on a black bezel and a quartz chronograph movement inside.
We choose to go to the moon
This is a watch built almost entirely out of references, and part of the fun (besides wearing the thing) is in counting them.
The design nods to Omega’s gold Speedmaster from 1969 — the space-watch lineage MoonSwatch has been riffing on since day one — down to the vertical satin dial finish, the gold beveled indexes with black lacquer, and period-correct Omega logos and typography.
The 1,969-piece cap matches the year. The 11 grams of gold is a wink at Apollo 11. The dial even has an Au750 stamp, aka the hallmark for 18K gold.
Flip it over and the battery cover has a golden moon with an anti-scratch coating, stamped with the landing date and a footprint marking the first step onto the Sea of Tranquillity. Each watch is individually numbered on the case at 9 o’clock. There’s a lot going on.
The catch, and there’s always a catch with a MoonSwatch, is that you can’t just walk in and buy one.
Swatch is running the release through an application it’s calling the ESTA — Electronic Swatch Timepiece Application — a 32-question form modeled on the US travel version. Only 1,969 applicants get approved to buy.
Where to Buy It
You have a short window of time to get this one. Applications run through Swatch’s ESTA system at swatch.com and close July 21 at 11:59 p.m. Swatch time (early afternoon in the US), so if you want in, you’re applying ASAP.
Swatch then selects 1,969 approved applicants, who get instructions to complete the purchase and pick the watch up at a Swatch store. It’s about $625.
