posted August 23, 2008 03:00 PM               

Editor's note: This thread begins with a series of previous messages excerpted and reproduced from the Early astronaut and cosmonaut watches topic in order to establish a Breitling Navitimer Cosmonaute-dedicated discussion.

Please use this topic to discuss the Breitling Navitimer Cosmonaute and its flights into space.

posted August 24, 2008 09:17 PM               

Unfortunately, Scott's chronograph was submerged in seawater during his recovery and was not very watertight. It was returned to Breitling for repair following the flight and, in a nice gesture, they replaced it with a pristine model.

Of course, today his flown watch would be very valuable, but that was not appreciated at the time. He was happy to get a replacement. The original has never been seen again, even after efforts by Breitling to track it down recently.

Scott didn't have too much luck with his personal gear on MA-7...his Randall survival knife, engraved with his name, also went missing from his kit. Bo Randall ended up making him a new one of those, too.

Two people somewhere in the world have some very nice flown items.

Breitling still makes the Cosmonaute today, but don't be fooled. It has a completely different automatic movement, unlike the original hand-wound Venus his had. At one time, they were fitted with a Lemania-based movement similar, if not identical, to the 861 caliber Omega Speedmasters. I'd look for one of those if I were shopping for one.

posted September 30, 2008 10:58 AM               

Recall that he received the reconfigured Breitling Navitimer just a few days before his flight — so on perhaps one of the Bill Taub photographs of Carpenter's capsule ingress on May 24, 1962, you can see the watch around his space-suited wrist.

You can also see what I assume is the Breitling around his wrist for his postflight arrival at Patrick AFB. But he returned it to Breitling HQ to fix some water damage in the week or so after his flight. The story he tells is that Breitling sent him a replacement watch, named the Cosmonaute.

What I believe to be the first flown watch,* therefore, may be in a vault somewhere. The question is where, and whose vault? It likely has a serial number that would date its manufacture to some time in April or May 1962. Breitling has changed hands since 1962.

posted October 05, 2008 05:56 PM               

Well, he went to the big annual watch show at Basel, and was met with alot of shoulder shrugs and funny looks. If there were such a vault, it was likely cleaned out long ago during one of the mergers/buyouts.

That is assuming, of course, that the orignal Breitling company even saw the value in retaining the watch. I can see at least three other possibilities:

1. Breitling disassembled the watch for cleaning and perhaps testing.

2. Breitling disassembled the watch and, not recognizing its' historic importance, returned parts or the whole watch to stock.

3. Someone at Breitling retained the watch as a personal momento and it remains in private (and very quiet) hands today.

posted October 14, 2008 03:38 PM               

Carpenter tried to explain that communication and navigation were his specific responsibilities for Project Mercury. Timekeeping was an essential subset of these.

So when he met the RAAF pilots who introduced him to their Breitling Navitimers in September 1961, when he was in Muchea for MA-4, he took the initiative to write to Breitling, telling Breitling that timekeeping was his specific responsibility and toward this end he wanted the reconfigured Navitimer to retain the circular slide rule and to delete the tachymeter in order to make room for the 24-hour dial.

Carpenter concedes that he proceeded in this direction without developing a consensus among the 7. "I held my ground maybe in defiance of the pressure of the group but in the belief I was right."

What was the design principle involved in the 24-hour dial, I asked? "NASA needed to conform its practices," he explained, "to the ways of the future and anticipate the pressures exerted by changing technology" in the environment of space. My sense was, at root, Carpenter believes that pilots "want to be able to say what they read. Nowhere on a 12-hour dial," he finally expressed with satisfaction, "does it say '8 PM'."

He remembers that the one they sent him did say "Cosmonaute" on the face. This name presented a bit of an ideological affront, he recalls, given cold war tensions but he reasoned that Breitling was just being "European."

posted January 05, 2009 05:19 PM               

So Bob and Scott meet during training for Sealab I in Florida ca. late 1963. Naturally, conversation soon turned to hardware, specifically, Scott's fancy Breitling (the replacement Breitling). He obliged Bob's curiosity about what Bob called "the astronaut watch" and took it off his wrist for Barth to inspect (and admire) more closely.

"What's this?" Barth asked, poking at a kind of bulge on the caseback. It was kind of a button that provided a little give if you pressed down on it fairly hard.

"Oh, that," Carpenter replied gravely. "Breitling made that especially for Mercury astronauts since they knew that we might be lonely, up there in space all alone." He's stringing Bob along, who is still listening earnestly. "And so Breitling decided to install a special button for us Mercury astronauts."

"We could press the button if the solitude got to be too much for some of the guys," he explained. "And Breitling designed it to push back. It was like having a buddy right there inside the spacecraft."

By now, Bob's awe began to wear off a little. He realized Scott was pulling his leg. They had a good laugh.

posted January 10, 2009 06:17 PM               

And then he explained that the joke really belonged to Bill Dana, who concocted the wide-eyed anecdote to all "the big astronaut watches" worn by the guys.

So, what about the "button" Bob says he saw on the caseback? The button that he thought was the battery case, I asked my dad.

"An invisible soft spot," he replied, channeling Bill Dana.

That pushed back?

posted May 29, 2012 10:33 AM               

Breitling models watch after historic space timepiece missing for 50 years

Swiss watchmaker Breitling is offering a new timepiece in celebration of the 50th anniversary of its watches' first launch into space, which was also the first time an American astronaut wore any wristwatch into orbit.

The newly-issued Breitling Navitimer Cosmonaute borrows some features from the chronograph that Scott Carpenter wore on NASA's Mercury-Atlas 7 mission, a historic watch has been missing for the half-century since Carpenter set the record as the second American to circle the Earth.