Watchmaker uses spare parts from space

Craft & Design Science
Watchmaker uses spare parts from space

Watch1 Wideweb  470X395,0
Watches made from Apollo 11 stuff… via NOTCOT.

Forget diamonds – one Swiss watchmaker is betting on watches made from moon dust, parts of the Apollo 11 rocket and bits of spacesuits to capture consumer cash as an economic slow down bites.

More than 600 watchmakers have the Swiss brand stamp, so Geneva-based Romain Jerome aims to use “inaccessible materials” to set its products apart from rivals such as Richemont’s Vacheron Constantin and independent watchmaker Patek Philippe.

“We chose the space conquest,” he said. “Going to the moon was the biggest adventure of human kind.”

The group will make 1969 watches – matching the year of Neil Armstrong’s and Buzz Aldrin’s first journey to the moon – for the “Moon Dust-DNA” collection.

The watches, which start at $US15,000 and can cost as much as $US500,000, will be launched in Geneva on Wednesday and presented to customers at next year’s Baselworld, the largest annual fair for the watch and jewelry industry.

Cool idea and everything, I want moon dust and space stuff to be so common that they’re not luxury items. How does one acquire moon dust? Does NASA even sell it to anyone?

4 thoughts on “Watchmaker uses spare parts from space

  1. RocketGuy says:

    Last I heard, actual moon samples are not legally sellable, they have to be bequeathed via NASA, and it’s usually for a museum or research. Not sure if that ban extends to flight hardware, but in any case I’d really like to see how authenticity is proven. Especially since NASA would be taking a dim view of such commerce…

    I dunno, it feels sorta creepy to me, like the ivory trade, although with admittedly less impact.

  2. RocketGuy says:

    There are several factual errors in the article:

    “The watches’ dials, which feature tiny craters, will have dust in them from the moon rock that was taken from the first visit to the Earth’s satellite.

    Steel from the Apollo 11 space shuttle will be used for the case and the strap will be made up of fibers from a spacesuit worn during the ISS mission, Arpa said.”

    1) I don’t think it’s legal to commerce in lunar material, so this sounds either shady and untrue, or shady and true.

    2) There was no “Apollo 11 Space shuttle”. It was a capsule, and I would be very surprised if NASA would allow them to remove metal from one of the most valued national artifacts to ever exist. Columbia (the capsule’s name, later reused on the ill fated space shuttle) currently resides in the NASM in Washington D.C.

    3) Using spacesuit fibers is more believable, as some old suits have been sold, such as the Russian Orlan or Sokol suits.

    The whole thing just sounds like BS to me.

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