India’s First 'Space-Tested' Watch? Here’s How Bangalore Watch Company Levelled Up Its Indian-Space-Themed Watches

Indian luxury wristwatch maker Bangalore Watch Company (BWC) have taken the next big step with their line of watches inspired by the Indian space programme.

Three years after the introduction of their “Apogee” collection, BWC on 1 May launched the sequel “Apogee Karman Line” — limited-edition watches that are built for and proven to work in space, or at least in the relatively upper reaches of Earth’s atmosphere.

While "apogee" refers to the point in an orbit around Earth that is the farthest from the planet, the "Karman line" represents the imaginary boundary separating Earth’s atmosphere from outer space, located roughly 100 kilometres (km) above sea level. Inspired by this demarcation line, BWC have named their newest 50-watch collection after it.

BWC’s space-qualified watch collection is a milestone as no other Indian watches have been space-tested before.

The Bengaluru-based independent watch brand, founded in 2018 by Mercy Amalraj and Nirupesh Joshi, launched their Apogee collection in 2021 to celebrate 50 years of the Indian space programme. The watches were based and titled around various space themes — Mazinus, Supernova, Horizon, Earthshine.

Manzinus in particular was an ode to India’s Chandrayaan missions. “Manzinus” is the name of an impact crater on the Moon. The famed Chandrayaan-3 mission touched down near Manzinus U, one of several satellite craters to Manzinus.

For BWC, a space-themed watch collection was great, but they wanted to take things to the next level. “We didn’t want to stop at creating watches that were merely inspired by space. We wanted to see if we could build them to be qualified and tested for space,” said Amalraj, BWC co-founder.

Deciding to level up, BWC embarked on a two-year journey to test their watch in space. They tied up with a space engineering firm in the United Kingdom (UK) for what they called the “Karman line project.” While the collaborators put their heads together to plan the spaceflight, BWC went about testing the watch for outer space conditions the best they could on the ground to ensure it worked just as well in the real space environment.

Typically, BWC tests all of their watches under pressure conditions of 100 metres under water. For the two prototype watches designed specifically for the experimental spaceflight, the company ramped up the pressure testing significantly, including subjecting the timepieces to negative atmospheric pressure to account for the vacuum of space. The watches were also put in freezers where temperatures fell to -30 degrees Celsius.

“Space is an unforgiving environment. There is no gravity, no oxygen, and extremely low temperatures,” said Joshi, who is also the creative director of the brand, adding, “But that is exactly the type of challenge we wanted to take on and push the capability of the Apogee watch.”

The day of the spaceflight arrived in early 2024. A hydrogen-powered high-altitude balloon — the floating vehicle of choice for centuries for scientific research, weather observation, telecommunications, space exploration, and even espionage — lifted for the skies with an ultra-light carbon-fibre spacecraft in which sat a prototype Apogee watch.

Besides daring to go where no Indian watch had gone before, the timepiece was special in one other way — its dial was made of an extraordinary piece of a blue-coloured Muonionalusta meteorite, known to be older than Earth, fallen from space hundreds of thousands of years ago, and recovered in Sweden in the early 2000s.

“We worked with Meteorite hunters to source pieces from the Muonionalusta meteorite. We then sent it to our manufacturing partners in Switzerland who cut the rock and processed it to our specifications to be used in our watch dials,” BWC said.

The specially crafted watch climbed up and up, slowly but steadily as a balloon does, rising up through the troposphere, then piercing the stratosphere, before hitting a peak altitude of 114,000 feet or 35 km.

It wasn’t quite the Karman line that signals entry into space — in fact, far from it — but it was still an impressive feat reaching an elevation significantly higher up than Mount Everest, the cruising altitudes of commercial jets, the clouds, and even the ozone layer.

At this height, about three-fourths of the way into the stratosphere, the watch lay exposed to harsh environmental conditions, including -65 degrees Celsius temperature, without the safe environs of a pressurised capsule.

The balloon was then deflated remotely and the spacecraft commenced its descent to the Earth’s surface, free-falling at about 350 km per hour. It had to endure a high degree of shock during its journey.

The 2-kilogram (kg) craft was gradually guided back down to the ground for recovery with the help of a drogue parachute, and all the while the wristwatch kept working as it would under regular circumstances here on the ground despite undergoing extreme variations in pressure and temperature.

The entire spaceflight journey of four hours was documented using multiple 4K cameras.

Once they had the vote of confidence from the prototype watch, BWC went ahead and made 50 timepieces in the same mould. “Each watch will be similar to the watch from our spaceflight and will carry a special piece of a blue-coloured Muonionalusta meteorite dial,” said Amalraj, adding “Each watch will be uniquely numbered too.”

The 50-piece limited edition Apogee Karman Line watches are priced at Rs 240,000. Orders began on 1 May.

“The Karman line project marks a critical moment for our brand,” Joshi said. “We've proven that our watches aren't just inspired by space — they're qualified and tested for space.”

BWC now have their eyes set on the natural next step — human-rating their Apogee watches. They hope to work with the Indian space programme, if such an opportunity presents itself, to develop another line of Apogee watches that would wrap around the wrists of Indian astronauts and work perfectly fine in space, as Indian space missions do time and again.

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