There are plenty of milestones that link watches and space. We all know about the first watch in space (Alexi Leonov’s Strela), the first automatic watch in space (Colonel William Pogue’s Seiko) and the first watch on the moon (do I even need to say it?). But there’s one particular extra-terrestrial first you might not have heard of before: the first watch repair in space.
Back in 2002, just two years after the International Space Station began its orbit of Earth, astronaut Don Pettit was having timekeeping issues. His watch at the time was the Omega Speedmaster X-33, the quartz version of other astronaut’s manual-wind Moonwatches. The problem was that parts of it had become loose. It was a factory issue that Omega corrected soon after, but that didn’t help Pettit at the time when the crown and buttons fell off and floated into the ether.
Omega Speedmaster X-33 being repaired in space by Don Pettit
Those parts weren’t gone forever though. They were actually caught by the ISS’s air filters and were rediscovered when the filters were being cleaned out. Rather than chuck the parts out, Pettit decided to make an impromptu repair. He used a strip of duct tape to stop the pieces floating off again and set to putting everything back together with nothing but a multitool, a pair of tweezers and a jeweller’s screwdriver.
Using engineering skills he’d practiced on diesel engines in college, he put the watch back together perfectly – which was something that had never been done before. Indeed, it wasn’t really thought that it could be done. At the time, replacing was the norm rather than repairing, which was easier, provided you had plenty of suppliers, but far less efficient. Pettit’s repair got NASA thinking that maybe there was a better way – especially when the Columbia disaster happened and supplies were in short, er, supply.
Omega Speedmaster X-33
In short, Pettit’s wasn’t just the first watch repair in space, but spurred NASA on to attempt much more nuanced repairs in zero gravity, something vital for the ISS’s continued success. Indeed, without that, an even more niche space-watch milestone might not have occurred: the first watch strap repair, courtesy of astronaut Scott Kelly.
Now, you may have heard of Scott Kelly before if you’re the kind of person that reads NASA mission logs or New Scientist regularly. Not only did he spend one year in orbit, but he was part of a very unusual experiment. You see, Scott has a twin brother – Mark Kelly. Other than Scott’s lustrous moustache, it’s impossible to tell the pair apart. And so, NASA embarked on an experiment to see just how space changed a person.
Scott Kelly along with his brother, former Astronaut Mark Kelly
Ten research teams around the USA came together to test for physiological, molecular and cognitive changes, using Mark (who by the way, is also a retired astronaut) as a baseline to compare Scott to. I won’t go into the details here, you can find an exhaustive list on the NASA website, but it showed how dramatically a human body can adapt to space and therefore how an even longer flight – to Mars, for example – will affect interplanetary travellers.
And yet that’s not all that happened. During Scott’s time on the International Space Station in 2015, one of his crewmates, Sergey Volkov, had an equipment malfunction. Nothing dramatic, no airlocks blowing out or anything like that. Instead, the bracelet of his Breitling Chronomat broke. Given the strains and stresses of taking a rocket out of the atmosphere, it’s perhaps not too surprising, but as I’ve already pointed out, a watch can be the difference between life and death. Having it flapping about your wrist like a limp parachute isn’t ideal.
Scott Kelly (front row middle), Sergey Volkov (rear left)
So, what to do? Well, Scott, along with his twin brother, just so happens to be a Breitling ambassador meaning that when the breakage occurred, he knew exactly who to call. After a brief satellite call to Mark, a Breitling repair kit was added into the essentials of the next ISS shipment from Earth, probably the most expensive repair item in history. Fortunately, Scott also knew his way around a watch, at least well enough to fix his colleague’s bracelet. Yes, it was fiddlier than anywhere on Earth – a spring bar is frustrating enough on terra firma, let alone floating in zero G – but it made for the first ever watch strap repair in space. It’s not a milestone that’ll come up much in record books, but it’s still a nice story of pioneering horology.
