The Space Watch: A Technical Review Of The State Of The Art

Space will get you, and your little watch too!

I just wrote about a very interesting watch for The 1916 Company Journal – that watch of course is the Barrelhand Monolith. The Monolith is the result of a six year development process in which Barrelhand’s Karel Bachand and his team – who included input from EVA users – looked at every component of the wristwatch in terms of how it could be adapted for use in crewed spaceflight. Of particular interest for anyone excited by engineering problems – which I think ought to be everyone, at least to some extent, as engineering decisions are potentially life-or-death decisions – is the fact that the Monolith was designed to be usable during EVA. The acronym stands for Extra Vehicular Activities. This can mean space walks, but it can also mean any activity which takes place outside the controlled environment of a habitat, spacecraft, or space station. The number of possible EVA environments is potentially enormous, and might include not only the surface of the Moon and Mars, but potentially other bodies as well, but the space walk scenario is sufficiently extreme and hazardous that it can serve as a proxy for numerous other possible scenarios. Inspired by the development process of the Monolith, I decided to try and get a handle on the basic problems raised by the question of using a watch in a space exploration environment in general, and during EVA in particular.

There is of course quite a big difference between a watch which is worn in space, and a watch which has been designed for the job. The most famous space watch is the Omega Speedmaster Professional, which was originally sold in 1957, and marketed as a watch for car enthusiasts. That a watch whose original design is now one year short of seven decades old, is still in use on the ISS, is certainly a testimony to the durability and ruggedness of the original design, with the caveat that after the Apollo era, the movement was changed from the classic column wheel controlled, lateral clutch caliber 321, to the 1/861 series, in which a lever and cam system – arguably more durable, and inarguably cheaper to make – was used. Today the Moonwatch uses the co-axial caliber 3861, which is a Master Chronometer-grade movement (this is slightly inaccurate as Master Chronometer certification is for the entire watch, not just the movement) which is essentially immune to magnetic fields, and also independently rated by the COSC and the Swiss Federal Institute for Metrology, to 0/+5 seconds maximum deviation in rate per day.

This is an excellent movement on many counts. It is not however, a watch or a movement designed specifically for crewed spaceflight or EVA, although it is flight qualified (twice, in fact). The Speedmaster is famous for having been used frequently for EVA activities, and it is still a standard piece of equipment on the Roscosmos-supplied Orlan EVA suits in use on the ISS. I include it here among the small number of watches designed for space travel, thanks to its historical importance, the fact that it is flight qualified, and also as its pros and cons illustrate some of the larger problems at hand.