Behind the Scenes: Crafting India's Space-Qualified Watch

At Bangalore Watch CompanyTM, we take pride in making watches that carry modern, 21st-century Indian backstories. In 2021, we introduced the Apogee collection as a celebration of the Indian Space Program. While many worldwide watch brands have created watches that pay tribute to other space programs, there has never been a watch brand that celebrated India’s space achievements before the Apogee collection.

In the past 18 months, we have been engaged on a secret project with a goal of moving the Apogee from being a space-inspired watch, to an actual space-qualified watch. Building a watch that is qualified for space is no mean feat, and we’re very proud of being able to achieve this.

In early 2024, an Apogee watch was sent to Space up to a height of 35 kms into the atmosphere. It withstood extreme conditions like -60 degrees Celsius, no atmosphere, no oxygen, and returned to Earth safely. The watch survived, and worked flawlessly throughout the Spaceflight.

The Karman Line is a set of 50 limited-edition watches that are built exactly like the watch that made the journey to Space. This is a celebration of what we believe to be a critical milestone in our brand’s journey.

Sending a watch to space is no mean feat. First is the challenge of how to launch. We narrowed down on a private company in the UK that specialized in high-altitude balloon flights. Second, is to build a light-weight carbon fiber platform that only weighed 2KGs and could carry our watch to Space, tethered to the balloon. Next, is our ability to recover this payload. We didn’t just want to launch something to Space, we wanted to recover the watch by landing the spacecraft safely back to Earth. And lastly, we had to perform multiple tests on the ground to ensure that the candidate watches that we choose to send up will survive the harsh environment of Space.

The specific watches were tested for varying levels of pressure and temperature changes to ensure the watch worked here (upto -30 degrees C) and gain the confidence that it will work in Space.

Bangalore Watch CompanyTM worked with a space-engineering company in the UK to plan and execute the spaceflight. Matters related to the flight path, the high-altitude balloon, the spacecraft construction, capturing the footage during spaceflight, recovery operations were all planned with the said Space-engineering company.

This is a moment of pride for the entire team. The team has been working on it non-stop for the last 18 months. On a high-profile project like this, it is easier to be distracted while you still have existing customers to support and other products that we continued to create and launch. But everyone here is now on cloud nine!

We’re also proud that we were able to achieve this significant milestone with a small team, but with a huge ambition. The Apogee is now India’s first space-qualified watch!

The Karman Line is an imaginary boundary 100Kms above Earth. This is where the atmosphere completely dissipates and you start feeling the effects of zero-gravity. Since the Apogee watch travelled 35Kms into the Earth’s atmosphere, we took the creative liberty of naming this watch after the Karman Line.

We are now launching a set of 50 limited edition watches that celebrate this milestone and achievement. These watches contain a dial made of an Outer Space Meteorite rock. This rock is believed to be older than Earth at 4.6 Billion years, and believed to have crashed to Earth from Space, about a million years ago.

Besides the story, the watch is special too – it gives 50 of our future watch owners the exclusive opportunity to wear a watch imagined and built in India, qualified for Space, carrying a rare blue outer-space Meteorite. This is an exotic watch that is sure to become a conversation piece!

All watches from the Apogee series are built with Cerasteel, a special case material proprietary to BWC. This is a fusion of Ceramic and Stainless Steel. The watches are also powered by a highly-accurate Swiss mechanism from La Joux-Perret, they are a manufacturer of high-quality watch mechanisms from La Chaux-de-Fonds in Switzerland. The watches are watertight to 100 Meters, and can withstand a magnetic field of 4800 amperes per metre. They are also built with scratch-resistant Sapphire crystals. A combination of these technical features make the watch extremely durable, and allowed us to test this in Space.

While there are a few Swiss watchmakers who have qualified their watches for Space, no other Indian brand has taken on such an endeavor until now.

As far as the company’s growth and plans are concerned, we have till now sold our products through our own website but now we do have plans to set up retail stores. We are looking at Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi NCR. These would not be in malls but in high street spaces.

Our prime focus has been on building a great product line which tells stories of modern India in fields where the country has made great strides in the past decade, be it cricket or space and aviation—we will introduce new variants and products to these themes.

To elaborate on specifically the Karman line—The Apogee is now a Space-qualified watch. The next milestone for this watch will be to get it human-rated. We will be proud to work with the Indian space program to develop a line of watches that are human-rated and can be worn on the wrists of astronauts. We hope that opportunity presents itself in the near future.

The number of watch enthusiasts in India has grown widely in the past few years. A lot of young people are now beginning to look at their wristwatches as not just time-telling instruments but as a means to extend their personality, or as a reminder of a strong emotional connection. The availability of most Swiss brands in India now makes the watch enthusiast’s journey easy and exciting. We hope that our offerings present a credible option as enthusiasts continue to look for unique watches that not only tell the time, but tell a story.

Enthusiasm towards Space is fairly new in India. I remember visiting Cape Canaveral many years ago where the visitor centers are teeming with Space enthusiasts, groups, and guided tours. This culture has only now began in India and it is great to see the enthusiasm. We hope, with our watches and stories, to inspire a new generation of young Space enthusiasts that look up with curiosity, as well as they do the watches on their wrists.