Apparently CDR John B. Herrington, one of the astronauts pictured in my Omega X-33 article, came by and left a comment on the article a little while ago. I must sheepishly admit that it somehow escaped my notice for some time, perhaps owing to the 3rd-party javascript widget I used to provide the commenting functionality on the older articles with a finnicky email notifier prone to being filtered by spam protection. But of course aside from being worthy of mention in its own right, I thought CDR Herrington’s comment significant enough that it deserved to be discussed and archived here.

All things considered, the watch collecting community is fairly small in the grand scheme of things. And even more so, my blog and webpages are probably a pretty tiny drop in what’s already a very small bucket. It’s easy to start thinking that my writings here have an audience consisting mostly of myself, a few collectors with too much time on their hands, and occasional passers-by who wander in accidentally by way of Google and other search engines. I’m speaking in something of a vacuum perhaps, or so it might seem.

But a few weeks ago an actual astronaut himself happened by and commented on one of my pages. I’m honored, and even more so by the fact that he took the time add some detail to the article for the sake of us collectors.

When I was working on the feature on the Omega Speedmaster Professional X-33 I scanned through the NASA archives looking for good photos that highlighted NASA’s use of the X-33. Of course there are hundreds to choose from, but among those I chose was this one of CDR John B. Herrington aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour during STS-113 because it showed him wearing not one but two X-33s:

Continued…