The Story of Extraterrestrial

Apogee is the farthest point of a satellite's orbit, and it lends its name to the line of space watches at Bangalore Watch Company. When we talk about orbit, we're also talking about everything beyond it, the parts of space that remain mostly unknown to us. That idea of the unknown is what we chose to build into a watch. 

The Apogee® line has always drawn from space, in more ways than one. Before the collection introduced any meteorite material, it drew from phenomena like the Earthshine and the Supernova, named after the pale glow that falls on the dark side of the moon and the rare light of an exploding star. Later, the Manzinus took its name and inspiration from India's own moon mission. 

The collection pushed further with the Karman Line, a watch that underwent actual spaceflight, qualifying the entire Apogee® line for space. With material sourced from the Muonionalusta meteorite, a meteorite made its way onto the Karman Line's dial, connecting the watch to material that is billions of years old and formed nowhere on Earth. 

Where the Manzinus carried a disc of meteorite, the Extraterrestrial II takes it further, with a dial made entirely from the Muonionalusta meteorite. Recovered from along the border of Finland and Sweden, this material is believed to be 4.5 billion years old. Its patterns, known as Widmanstätten patterns, are formed by the slow cooling of Nickel-Iron crystals over millions of years in space, a process impossible to recreate on Earth. 

That also makes it one of the hardest materials we work with. For every completed meteorite dial, four to five discs are lost in the process, since the material isn't industrially produced and doesn't behave like standard brass dials. Each dial carries its own pattern, so no two are ever alike. 

The Extraterrestrial II's case is built from Cerasteel™, a proprietary material combining a high-grade steel core with an outer ceramic coating, giving the watch its matte grey, avant-garde look. Together, the meteorite dial and the Cerasteel case make it a watch built to celebrate five decades of the Indian space program. 

The idea of meteorite as material carried forward into Visitor, where a black meteorite dial draws inspiration from 'Oumuamua, the first interstellar object observed passing through our solar system. Where Extraterrestrial II represents material that arrived on Earth, Visitor represents something that only passed through, never staying long enough to be fully understood. Across these watches, the Apogee® collection moves between what has landed here and what remains unknown, deep space, the moon, the edge of our atmosphere, and now, a visitor from beyond our solar system. 

Every Apogee® watch is produced in limited numbers, because the materials themselves don't allow for anything else. It's part of a wider effort at BWC to build watches that can't be found anywhere else, whether that's the space-qualified Apogee collection, the cricket-inspired Cover Drive, or the outdoor-focused Peninsula Professional. Each collection tells its own story, but they're all built on the same idea, that a watch should carry something you can't find anywhere else.