Hi there! I'm the stateside one; the one who likes to build space chassis in his spare time.
As of this post, we have gone live with the first round of pre-orders of the Artemis space-flown watch. We'll be making a few update posts here as the production process continues, preparations are made for flight, and the greatest mission in horology takes off as early as this summer. Let's talk about the process:
The 100 Artemis watch dials will be flown in a specially designed standard "box" known as a CubeSat (our flight model pictured above). Introduced in 1999, the CubeSat standard has supported at least 4,000 missions to Earth orbit and beyond. Our CubeSat won't quite go as far. Instead, it'll be riding a rocket to the edge of space and back in the same way that many scientific instruments do.
Rockets that fly this kind of mission are called "sounding rockets," from the nautical term "to sound." Sounding in the ocean involved casting weighted ropes overboard to get depth measurements. In much the same way, sounding rockets are used to get measurements of the Earth's atmosphere and space environment, especially above 75 kilometers.
We are working towards completing a contract with a launch service provider (LSP for short) that will allow us to ride along on a large sounding rocket and recover this payload. Due to normal levels of non-disclosure within the aerospace industry, we can't name our LSP until this paperwork is completed. Look out for a blog post once the contract blackout period is lifted!
However, we're moving forward with presales and reservations in order to get the Artemis out to as many potential customers as possible and help offset the early production costs from prototyping the first few examples (pictured above: first production Artemis dials). By paying for a non-refundable reservation, you're helping to make sure this first mission makes it to space.
The goal of this first production run of 100 units (80 standard, 20 "Founder's Edition") is to more or less prove out the entire business model. A single CubeSat chassis like the one we're prepping for flight could accommodate upwards of 200 dials before running out of mass, and future production runs will probably approach that number. Supporting this initial run will help us at TDP International (both of us!) to produce more Artemis watches, more interesting and unusual timepieces, and yet more surprises.