14th April 2026: Last year, luxury watchmaker IWC Schaffhausen partnered with aerospace company Vast, the team behind Haven-1, set to become the world’s first commercial space station, in a groundbreaking collaboration. This year, they’ve taken that partnership one step further.
IWC Schaffhausen has officially unveiled the Pilot’s Venturer Vertical Drive, a timepiece specifically engineered to meet the demands of human spaceflight. Designed with astronauts in mind, the watch has now received space qualification from Vast for flight on Haven-1.
At its core, the Pilot’s Venturer Vertical Drive displays mission reference time in a 24-hour format, including both GMT and UTC, allowing astronauts to stay connected to time on Earth while operating in orbit. In an environment where natural day and night cycles disappear, maintaining a clear reference to Earth time is essential not only for mission operations, but also for preserving a sense of routine and human connection to life back home.
Speaking on the innovation, IWC Schaffhausen CEO Chris Grainger-Herr says the move into space was a natural evolution for the brand, rooted in its long-standing heritage in aviation and precision engineering. He describes the timepiece as the “first ever designed pilot’s watch for the next space age,” adding that the collaboration with Vast was driven by a shared ambition to “push the limits and come up with something ingenious.”
Built for performance beyond Earth, the watch features a compact, highly functional design tailored for microgravity and three-dimensional movement, ensuring astronauts can operate it with ease in space.
The watch is designed to support life in orbit, where spacecraft circle the Earth roughly every 90 minutes, requiring astronauts to rely entirely on precise, functional timekeeping to structure their day.
Vast’s lead astronaut, Andrew Feustel, places the partnership within the wider context of the rapidly evolving space industry: “This is the first time in history that we’ve seen this level of investment, engagement and capability in putting humans and hardware into space.”
He also underlines the practical need for precision timekeeping beyond Earth: “We live by the clock in space. The challenge is that we don’t have any natural sense of time during the day, because we see 16 sunrises and sunsets every 24-hour period.”
Feustel adds that while watches have travelled to space before, this marks a major leap forward in design: “This is the first time we’ve seen a company purposely create a functional interface that allows a person working in space to operate a watch effectively.”
As IWC Schaffhausen and Vast continue to push boundaries together, the partnership signals a new era, not just for watchmaking, but for the future of human spaceflight and accessibility beyond Earth.
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ABOUT IWC SCHAFFHAUSEN
IWC Schaffhausen is a leading Swiss luxury watch manufacturer based in Schaffhausen in the north-eastern part of Switzerland. With collections like the Portugieser and the Pilot’s Watches, the brand covers the whole spectrum from elegant to sports watches. Founded in 1868 by the American watchmaker and engineer Florentine Ariosto Jones, IWC is known for its unique engineering approach to watchmaking, combining the best of human craftsmanship and creativity with cutting-edge technology and processes.
Over its more than 150-year history, IWC has earned a reputation for creating professional instrument watches and functional complications, especially chronographs and calendars, which are ingenious, robust, and easy for customers to use. A pioneer in the use of titanium and ceramics, IWC today specialises in highly engineered watch cases manufactured from advanced materials, such as coloured ceramics, Ceratanium®, and titanium aluminide.
A leader in sustainable luxury watchmaking, IWC sources materials responsibly and takes action to minimise its impact on the environment. Along the pillars of transparency, circularity, and responsibility, the brand crafts timepieces built to last for generations and continuously improves every element of how it manufactures, distributes, and services its products in the most responsible way. IWC also partners with organisations that work globally to support children and young people.
