Bangalore Watch Company’s Apogee is India’s first Space-qualified watch

Boutique watch brand Bangalore Watch Company has successfully tested a watch from its Apogee series in Space. According to the company, the prototype watch accomplished a stratospheric flight by travelling 114,000 feet into the Earth’s atmosphere and returned safely to Earth in working condition at a private launch facility in the UK earlier this year. The Bangalore-based micro brand is celebrating the achievement with the launch of the Apogee Karman Line that will be powered by a La Joux Perret movement and will be limited to 50 pieces.
It will carry a piece of blue-coloured Muonionalusta meteorite dial that is known to have fallen from Space and recovered in Sweden. The watch is priced at ₹2,50,000. Unless you are an astronaut, Space watches offer, like with certain SUVs, the intangible satisfaction of owning an object that can withstand or plough through extremes. But Space-testing the Apogee was also a natural progression for the range, which was launched in 2021 as a tribute to the Indian Space Research Organisation’s cost-efficient and stirring advances in space science research and planetary exploration. The Apogee series features twin-crown, dual-time watches with cushion cases made of steel with an outer ceramic coating.
“We wanted to take the story forward — the Apogee is now not just a watch inspired by Space, but also qualified for it,” said Nirupesh Joshi, who co-founded BWC in 2017 with Mercy Amalraj and has since launched several lines inspired by, among others, the MiG 21 fighter aircraft and the game of cricket. A Space-qualified watch has to withstand massive fluctuations in temperature, pressure, humidity and gravity. It also has to be robust enough to weather high G- Forces and extreme acceleration. The history of Space watches is dominated by the Omega Speedmaster, which is the only watch to be endorsed by NASA, but the last half a century has seen other brands successfully endure the harsh realities of Space.
These include Bulova, Seiko, and Breitling, among others. The Swiss watch brand Fortis, in fact, has been the official supplier to Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, since 1994. BWC’s Project Karman Line began late last year with a bunch of stock Apogees being put through a variety of tests both in Bangalore and at the site of the private facility in the UK. “The tests involved two things mainly. One was differential pressure — pressure in Space is almost zero or negligible — and testing for extreme temperatures. When it did go up some 35 kilometres, we didn’t want the gaskets to come off or condensation to appear under the crystal,” said Joshi.
Joshi said that he was also particular about exposing the watch to the near vacuum, extreme temperatures, and low pressure of Space. So, the company teamed up with a UK-based space-engineering firm which specialised in hydrogen-powered high-altitude balloons and launched space flights in which the private payload was exposed. Joshi said that he would have loved to work with an Indian space tech company on the Apogee Karman Line but decided against it because of numerous regulations and the fact that a majority of private Indian space tech companies lacked recovery capabilities.
The stratospheric flight took place near Sheffield in England, in late January. An ultra-light carbon-fibre spacecraft, carried by a high-altitude balloon, transported the prototype Apogee watch to Outer Space. The craft reached a peak altitude of 35 km above Earth before being remotely guided back to Earth for recovery. “The Apogee tackled everything, including -65°C temperatures and high shock forces upon re-entry. And when it was retrieved, everything was functional,” said Joshi.
The Karman Line is an imaginary line 100 kilometres above MSL, bordering Earth’s atmosphere and the beginning of Space. The naming of the watch after the notional boundary, Joshi said, represents BWC’s future ambitions. “We’ve gone up 35 kilometres, and the aim is to go higher. The next milestone involves human-rating this watch, ” he said. Another concomitant ambition is to work with ISRO on a space-qualified watch for its manned missions. “We have not yet actively engaged with them, but that is very much on the drawing board,” said Joshi.