A watch fit for spaceflight
In low Earth orbit, the sun rises and sets every 90 minutes, compressing a single day into as many as 16 cycles of light and dark. In such conditions, the usual cues that anchor our understanding of time break down, and a wristwatch’s standard 12-hour dial becomes less reliable.
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In 1962, astronaut Scott Carpenter, preparing for NASA’s Mercury-Atlas 7 mission aboard the Aurora 7 spacecraft, approached Breitling with a request to modify the Navitimer for a 24-hour display, designed to distinguish day from night and maintain temporal orientation while in orbit. The resulting watch would become known as the Navitimer Cosmonaute, the first Swiss watch worn in space.
The Navitimer functioned as more than a timepiece. Long before the watch reached orbit, it had already been established as a compact, practical tool in the cockpit. Its rotating bezel incorporated a circular slide rule that enabled in-flight calculations—an instrument that Carpenter, like many pilots of the mid-twentieth century, came to rely on during his flight training. The watch allowed aviators to work through fuel consumption, distance, and airspeed conversions with minimal flow interruption. The Navitimer’s utility defined its reputation as much as its design.
More than six decades after Carpenter orbited Earth three times wearing his custom Navitimer, Breitling returns to the Cosmonaute lineage with the Navitimer Cosmonaute Artemis II, a limited edition that ties the early years of space exploration—and the Navitimer’s aeronautical roots—to the modern Artemis era.
The Cosmonaute’s defining 24-hour display remains, paired with a galaxy-blue meteorite dial cut to reveal the stone’s natural Widmanstätten pattern—formed in deep space as its metals cooled over immense spans of time. The pattern gives each dial a distinct visual character, so no two of the 450 timepieces are identical.
Beneath the dial, the Cosmonaute Artemis II is powered by the Breitling Manufacture Caliber B02, a hand-wound chronograph movement engineered for precision and mechanical consistency. The rim of the exhibition caseback is engraved with “Artemis II” and “One of 450,” and the mission logo is printed on the sapphire crystal window, through which the watch’s internal architecture is displayed. The Cosmonaute retains its aeronautical identity through the circular slide rule bezel, the AOPA wings logo, and its three-subdial chronograph layout, complemented by its 44 mm case, red accents, and matching blue alligator strap.
In the decades following the Mercury-Atlas 7 mission, the Cosmonaute has continued to be worn by astronauts: John Glenn, James McDevitt, and Robert Hines all chose the watch, a symbol of their place in the pantheon of spaceflight. Breitling’s Artemis II edition carries that legacy forward into the present and offers the public the same marriage of purpose and design. Ownership, then, is not simply a matter of collecting a historically significant wristwatch. It is participation in a lineage that extends from the wrists of astronauts to those who choose to wear it today.