Bremont Is Sending a Watch to the Moon’s Surface

By the time astronauts next touch down on the lunar surface—NASA is targeting 2028, China 2030—a new watch from British brand Bremont may have been roaming the dust and craters for a couple of years or more.

The Artemis II crew members were each issued a Speedmaster X-33 wristwatch for their mission, the long-lived digital astronaut watch from official NASA supplier Omega, whose legendary Speedmaster Professional “Moonwatch” accompanied Apollo astronauts to the lunar surface in 1969. (Commander Reid Wiseman reportedly brought a traditional Moonwatch along for the ride as well.)

Omega doesn't have an exclusive lock on what wristwear NASA astronauts choose to bring along themselves, as the reported presence of three Navitimer Cosmonaute watches from Breitling—modern updates of a watch worn by astronaut Scott Carpenter when he orbited Earth in 1962—proves otherwise. Sure enough, Breitling revealed a new limited edition yesterday, the Navitimer Cosmonaute Artemis II, with a blue dial made of meteorite.

But neither Swiss maker is set to be the first brand to have a watch back on the moon. In a kind of extraterrestrial invocation of the moment Rolex famously attached a specially made watch to the hull of a submersible that plunged to the bottom of the Mariana Trench (back in 1960), Bremont's Supernova Chronograph will be attached to the chassis of Flex Lunar Innovation Platform (FLIP), a lunar rover from California-based aerospace startup Astrolab, when it is deposited on the moon later this year.

A 41-mm integrated-bracelet sports chronograph in 904L stainless steel, the Supernova is the inaugural reference of an entirely new, explicitly futuristic space-inspired collection at Bremont, the British company now owned by Wall Street super-investor Bill Ackman. Its three-dimensional perforated dial takes its visual cues from the geometry of spacecraft solar sails: an interlocking perforated grid motif set over a full layer of blue-emission Super-LumiNova that, in low light, glows with the kind of luminescent blue Bremont CEO Davide Cerrato compares to “the energy inside spaceships, or light-speed acceleration in Star Wars.”

A multifaceted decahedral black ceramic bezel and sandwich-style three-piece case—a reworking of Bremont's signature Trip-Tick construction—house a chronometer-rated automatic chronograph movement made by Sellita, with a 62-hour power reserve.

The watch will be a passenger aboard the FLIP rover, due to launch as part of Astrobotic's Griffin Mission One (Griffin-1), expected to land at the lunar south pole at some point in the second half of this year.

It's a one-way mission: The rover will remain permanently on the lunar surface, with the watch ticking away as it roams the landscape. FLIP's objectives include reaching elevated positions on the lunar terrain, gathering data on lunar dust accumulation, testing dust-mitigation coatings, and surviving a two-week lunar night in hibernation (which would be a first for a US rover).

In terms of serious timekeeping data for Bremont, the mission is frankly symbolic. The watch will be positioned vertically in a specially designed housing within the FLIP's chassis, between its front wheels. Only the watch head, weighing 107 grams, is included, glued in place using a specialist composite, its face visible to FLIP's HD cameras. But the hibernatory periods will mean the watch (whose mechanical movement is driven in normal circumstances by the motion of the wearer's arm) will stop running once its 62-hour power reserve runs down.

When the FLIP is on the move again, its motion should—in theory—jolt the mechanism into action once more. Despite the gravitational pull that's a sixth of the Earth's, the acceleration, pitches, and tilts of the rover should swing the winding rotor, if with less torque and efficiency than on Earth.

"My guess is that the watch will function from time to time, but for short periods," Cerrato says. "We will learn along the way. But that's what is exciting—it projects us into a thinking process that is absolutely out of the box. Just the fact of having it there is inspiring." However, there is little doubt that Bremont will, just like other brands with any ties to the cosmos, mine its new space connection for all it is worth.

FLIP itself, which weighs just 1,058 pounds and carries a mix of commercial and government payloads, four HD cameras, and a deployable solar array, is fundamentally a technology demonstrator for Flexible Logistics and Exploration (FLEX), Astrolab's much larger SUV-sized rover destined to support NASA's Artemis program. The firm developed the FLIP from scratch after NASA's equivalent vehicle for which the Griffin-1 mission was contracted, the VIPER, was put on pause in 2024. This left Astrobotic seeking a stand-in in short order. Astrolab, which signed the contract within a month of hearing about the opportunity in the fall of 2024, took the FLIP from blank sheet to finished rover in roughly a year.

Its standout feature is its hyper-deformable wheels, minutely structured from silicone, composite, and stainless steel, which create a soft, enlarged contact surface with the terrain. "It's like if you're off-roading in a Jeep or Land Rover where you let some air out of the tires to go softer and spread the load over a larger area," explains Astrolab's founder, Jaret Matthews. While the moon's nighttime temperatures of around -200 degrees Celsius (around -328 Fahrenheit) would cause conventional rubber tires to become glass-like and shatter, Astrolab's solution is intended to keep the rover from sinking into the unconsolidated lunar dust—or regolith—that covers the environment.

Both watch and rover are currently being put through their paces in Spacecraft Protoflight Qualification testing at Astrolab's facility in Hawthorne, California. "It's essentially shake and bake," says Matthews. "There's the bake-out—basically putting the hardware in an oven for an extended period to drive off volatiles; thermal cycling, taking the temperature up and down between extremes many times; and thermal vacuum cycling, doing the same inside a vacuum chamber. We also do electromagnetic interference testing.”

Then there's the shake part. "Random vibration on a shaker table that emulates the vibration profile of the launch vehicle and landing. We do shock—quite literally hitting things with a hammer to emulate separation events such as launch vehicle stages separating—and we also do acoustic testing, putting it in a room with speakers blasting sound at it," Matthews says.

All tests must be passed for any component to fly, though given Bremont has a track record of using aircraft ejector seat testing for its watches, Cerrato says he isn't worried.

“We are facing conditions and tests we never thought about,” he says. "We are looking at numbers for temperature, aging, vibration, and radiation exposure that we never thought we had to put a watch through, but the tests are actually far more extreme than what it will experience during the mission."

Bremont and Astrolab are unlikely to enjoy the lunar limelight alone for long. Following Breitling’s news yesterday, today IWC Schaffhausen has also unveiled the Pilot's Venturer Vertical Drive, the brand's first tool watch engineered from the ground up for human spaceflight, and the product of its partnership with Vast, the California-based company building Haven-1, slated to be the world's first commercial space station when it launches into Earth orbit.

Designed for operation by astronauts wearing pressure-suit gloves, the IWC watch dispenses with a conventional crown entirely: all functions, including winding and time-setting, are controlled via a patent-pending rotating bezel and a side-mounted rocker switch.

From a different end of the market entirely, California startup Barrelhand has spent several years developing the Monolith, an EVA-rated mechanical tool watch with a 3D-printed titanium chassis, an "airlock" sealed cr