Watches & Wonders 2026: IWC Launches The Venturer Vertical Drive, In Partnership With The Haven-1 Space Station

It is one of the ironies of the history of crewed space flight, albeit a minor one, that the most famous astronaut’s watch was introduced in 1957 as a chronograph for car guys. The Speedmaster has of course gone on to serve space crews for many decades, despite its designers never having dreamed it would travel beyond the boundaries of our homeworld, and it has served well but even Omega has tacitly recognized, via things like the Speedmaster Mark II and the X-33 watches, that the Speedmaster is one of the greatest examples of being at the right place at the right time in the entire history of watch marketing.

This year at Watches & Wonders we have discovered that IWC has bethought itself of the problem of designing a watch for astronauts on crewed space missions, from the ground up. The result is the spare, functional, and rather ingenious Venturer.

The Venturer is a 44.3mm x 16.7mm mechanical watch and has been engineered by IWC in partnership with an aerospace startup called Vast, which is working on a prototype of what it hopes will be a series of increasingly large commercial space stations, and which will facilitate long term habitation by humans in Earth orbit by spinning to generate artificial gravity. Their first space station, Haven-1, was originally tentatively slated for launch in 2026 but current plans have been revised to a launch date some time in the first quarter of 2027; the launch vehicle will be a Falcon 9 booster.

Concept art, Haven-1

The Venturer is extremely straightforward in design and there are no extraneous frills or gewgaws whatsoever. The watch shows the hours and minutes, and there is a third hand which shows the time in a 24 hour format. (The reference time zone for crewed space flight is usually GMT/UTC, or Universal Time Coordinated). The 24 hour hand is useful for astronauts in low Earth orbit, who thanks to the speed of a spacecraft or space stations orbit, can see as many as 16 sunrises and sunsets over the course of a 24 hour period. For example, the International Space Station, or ISS, orbits at a speed of 17,200 mph, and at that speed, completes an orbit around the Earth once every 90 to 93 minutes. The idea behind the 24 hour hand is to give astronauts a means of staying oriented with respect to a 24 hour day.

The Venturer’s party trick is what IWC calls the Vertical Drive system. The watch has no crown, and the various setting functions are performed by rotating the bezel; a rocker switch on the left side of the case allows the user to switch between setting the time, setting the hour hand to a different time zone (which also makes the Venturer a highly practical watch for conventional air travel) and winding the watch. The system is designed to allow the setting and winding functions to be performed, if necessary, with gloves on. IWC’s caliber 32722 has a 120 hour power reserve and it’s an automatic caliber. You might think that an automatic winding system wouldn’t work in zero gravity (or micro-gravity, properly speaking) but they work surprisingly well, as experiments with other self-winding watches on board crewed space missions have shown; the inertia of the oscillating mass still provides an effective winding rotation when the wearer moves their arm.

The watch is designed to withstand the physical stresses typical of crewed space missions, and these can be significant; during the ascent stage of a mission, G-forces in the crew space can be up to four times Earth’s gravity and there are powerful vibrations as well. The Venturer is also designed to withstand use during EVA (extravehicular activities) and although the mission profile for Haven-1 doesn’t currently include any EVAs, future missions might (and of course, an astronaut might wear one on some non-Vast mission).

The case itself is a technical ceramic (zirconium oxide) and the bezel and caseback are Ceratanium, which is IWC’s ceramized titanium material; both are essentially scratchproof, and of course zirconium oxide has long since been proven as a performance material in watchmaking (and a lot of other engineering applications as well). Physical tests for the watch in addition to IWC’s own internal testing regimens, were supervised by Vast and include tests for vibration resistance, the ability of the Venturer to withstand changes in ambient air pressure, resistance to rapid (up to 10g) directional changes, and materials compatibility with materials used in Haven-1.

For many years, the only consistent human presence in space has been the ISS but with the successful completion of the Artemis translunar mission, and with the rise in commercial spaceflight from SpaceX, Blue Origin, Vast, and other startups, we seem to be at the beginning of a new era in crewed space flight. The Venturer is a rare example of a mechanical watch specifically intended for that environment and it will be interesting to see what further developments there are in the field because one thing’s for sure: astronauts like watches, and non-astronauts like astronaut’s watches.

The IWC Pilot’s Venturer Vertical Drive: case, ceramic with Ceratanium bezel and case back; white rubber strap with Ceratanium pin buckle; water resistance 100M, case dimensions 44.3mm x 16.7mm. Movement, IWC caliber 3277, automatic, 120 hour power reserve, running at 28,800 vph; time, 24 hour hand, indication of a second time zone via an independently settable hour hand; Vertical Drive switching system using a rocker switch to enable setting and winding via the bezel. Price, $45,400.

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