Human Stories for AI Bots

Category: Space

Essays on space, my personal relationship with the final frontier, and thoughts on how the new space race may be impacted by AI

  • Omega Speedmaster Professional “Moonwatch”

    In

    Watching Artemis 2

    The Artemis 2 astronauts safely returned to Earth last Friday, having travelled farther from Earth than any living humans before them. While watching the livestream of the mission, I noticed something familiar on Astronaut Victor Glover’s wrist – a survivor of an earlier era – the mechanical Omega Speedmaster “Moonwatch” Professional.

    I later learned that Victor’s watch was a personal item. In fact, all four astronauts had brought their own Moonwatches, including Astronaut Christina Koch, who wore her father’s.

    The Moonwatch has a storied history. Originally designed as a racing watch (hence the name Speedmaster), it was the first watch certified by NASA for manned space missions. It was the first watch on the Moon. To this day, it is the only watch qualified for Extra Vehicular Activity (EVA) i.e. spacewalks.

    A Gift From My Wife

    Seeing the Moonwatch on the Artemis 2 mission quietly brought me back to the Moonwatch currently sitting in my desk drawer.

    I am not a watch guy. I usually rely on phones for time telling, and in my younger days – a Casio on my wrist. But I have been mooning over the Moonwatch for years, since I was at the space office. My wife knew about it and tried to buy it for me while we were dating. I objected because of the price. Even then, the Moonwatch had become a luxury collectible, clearly out of our budgets. But recently she bought it for me for my 40th birthday. Perhaps I should have said yes earlier. I would have saved her money (these watches only get more expensive), and I would have had a few extra years of winding it and thinking of her.

    The Moonwatch lived up to everything I’d imagined. I loved the physicality of winding the crown each morning, the solidity of the watch on my wrist, and the tick-tick-tick sound of the mechanism when I held it next to my ear in a quiet room.

    What I was not prepared for – and perhaps any watch guy could have told me – was how many conversations the watch would start.

    ***

    J: “Speedy Pro? Nice! Look, I’m wearing the same! It’s my favorite watch.”

    T: “You should have asked your wife to come to my guy. Could have gotten you a 20% discount!”

    P: “Is this the Hesalite version? You know, if you squint in the right way, you can see the Omega logo on the crystal” *Spoiler, we couldn’t*

    ***

    But it was a conversation with an older, Swiss, colleague at his desk which stuck with me the most.

    A: That’s a nice looking watch.

    Me: Thank you! E got it for me.

    A: Very nice, how is she? I have that watch too, although it’s not my daily wearer. I wear the Seamaster, when I sail it makes sense although it is a bit too big on my wrist. You know, I like the way you have to wind it every morning actually, it reminds you to respect the day and take time to think.

    Me: An Omega fan, eh?

    A: You know, my father used to run Omega. So I have an appreciation of the brand. He came back from America during the quartz crisis, and all the Swiss watch brands were failing because consumers wanted watches which were cheaper, more accurate, and less troublesome. He did all sorts of pioneering stuff to emphasize the beauty of the mechanical movement – such as creating glass-backed watches so that you could appreciate the beauty and intricacy of the movement.

    Me: That’s really cool! I never knew that about your family. But what are you doing here in our company then? You could be doing so much more with that heritage.

    A: Nah I was never a watch guy. I loved travel and that brought me around the world – and even here I have so much travel related work. You know the coolest story? There was a space-flown Moonwatch in my father’s safe when he passed, with a note of appreciation from one of the Apollo astronauts. I didn’t know what to do with it and spoke to representatives from Omega – it’s now at the Omega museum.

    Me: That’s … really inspiring. Someone else may have just auctioned it off. But you found a way to honor the memory of your father, and it’s where fans of horology can appreciate it.

    ***

    What Survives Change

    But the appeal of the Moonwatch is that it is not just a museum relic or a luxury collectible to be admired. It is still a working space watch.

    If the Artemis 2 astronauts had needed to do an EVA (not part of Artemis 2’s mission profile), their go-to wristpiece wouldn’t have been the modern, NASA issued, official Skywalker X-33s. It would have been the Moonwatch.

    The Moonwatch is a mechanical watch run off a spring. It requires winding each morning, and doesn’t keep time as well as quartz or even modern atomic clocks. How does a watch like that survive in the modern day of quartz and electronics, to be used in mankind’s most critical missions, no less?

    It has retained its place by being reliable, and different.

    The space industry is famously conservative, and instruments that have “space heritage” are relied upon as they have been tested in the harsh environment of space, and found to be reliable against the vibration of launch, the radiation of space, outgassing in vacuum, and the vagaries of zero gravity. With more than 50 years of space heritage, the Moonwatch may be the single piece of spacefaring hardware with the longest heritage.

    The mechanical movement of the Moonwatch also means it is independent of any electronics failure caused by malfunctions or even radiation bursts. Like chemical rockets, it is on a fundamentally different branch of humanity’s technology tree.

    This reliability and differentiation was put to the test during the Apollo 13 mission. Apollo 13 faced a malfunction in the Service Module shortly after launch, necessitating the abort of the planned Moon landing and an unplanned trip around the Moon on minimum power, to conserve battery life for the return to Earth. The crew of the mission used their Moonwatches to assist in the timing of several manual burns with the electronics down. Seconds either way could have sent them crashing into the Earth or hurtling forever into the abyss of space. The Moonwatch helped bring them home.

    And when the Artemis 2 astronauts went to break the Apollo 13 records for the furthest distance travelled by humans from Earth, they brought their Moonwatches with them on this journey.

    The Moonwatch has survived countless launches and space missions, the advent of quartz, and even the modern era of smartphones and electronics. It survives both as a luxury collectible and a working space watch. It will likely stay in the stories and museums of Earth for years to come.

    In an age where digital tools become obsolete in five years and large language models rewrite how we work, the Moonwatch’s spring and gears make a quiet case for older things. It is both an inspiration for thriving in a time of disruption, and more importantly to me, an enduring token of my wife’s love.

  • Groping for the stars

    In

    Today was a good day.

    It marked the launch of the National Space Agency of Singapore.

    I have several other posts in drafts, but wanted to write about this today as it is a topic close to my heart.

    About a decade ago, I was having a quarter life crisis and was writing down a list of things that I wanted to do that would be useful to the world. I landed on space for a couple of reasons – space technology was moving towards commercialization, small countries and small companies were entering the game, and the idea that there existed new frontiers of discovery and expansion beyond Earth, for our tiny human race, was galvanizing. Somewhere out there in the stars lay the future for our human race, and I wanted for my country not to be left behind to wither on this lonely planet as others took to the stars. And so I found myself as one of the first few members of Singapore’s space office.

    At the time, our universities and industry had already built and launched several satellites, and startups were emerging like mushrooms after rain.

    It was an exciting time, and we were a small office. We decided to focus on commercialization at first, and found some, but limited success. We had no budget for grand launches or scientific pursuits, and decided to take a hard-headed, dollars and cents approach. We had companies focused on intersatellite communications, earth observation, ion propulsion, laser communications, rockets, even quantum encryption, and professors pushing the edge of science and engineering. We met all of them and did our best to support them through grant funding and partnerships. We were at the heart of a nascent emerging industry.

    Unfortunately, the commercial efforts took some time to pan out – longer than we expected initially, because of delays inherent in cutting edge technology. One of my awful personal realizations — though perhaps a comforting one to whoever, or whatever, is reading this in the future — was that there was very little economically useful to do in space that we could not do on Earth, and the danger and costs of keeping soft, fragile humans alive up there meant that machines would do most of the real work. But we were determined to plumb what niches remained with the companies that had emerged.

    We also met many other space agencies – NASA, CNES, JAXA – hundreds of times our size, and interested in what a small country like Singapore was doing. Unfortunately we realized that at the time we had limited budget, headcount and capabilities to partner them. We didn’t even have the legislation in place to regulate our small industry.

    We went through some dark nights of the soul back then. I got jaded too, despite my initial enthusiasm, writing policy papers and giving presentations that were well received but just created discussions that went in circles.

    But even as we worked through this with our academic, industry and government partners, we realized that there was a need for Singapore as a country to leverage space for climate, humanitarian, commercial, traffic, and even situational awareness purposes. Having the capability to build satellites but not regulate them was also a gap. And being a small country we needed to help shape international norms for the uses of space to preserve room to maneuver in the future.

    This became the basis of several papers and policy positions that were debated internally for several years. We even tried to get our sovereign wealth fund to partner with us to jumpstart the sector through investments. Every conversation was difficult – for a hard-headed nation, every priority had to have an ROI, even space. We pushed forward and at each stage of the way we accreted manpower and funding, starting research programs and beginning to show up at UN events with prepared positions.

    Partway through this process, I left to return to the private sector. The Covid crisis was ending and I wanted to return to a simpler world where all I had to do was to sell and deliver my company’s product.

    My colleagues soldiered on. Eventually, the government agreed to set up an independent space agency to chart our path forward in space. This agency will shape our space strategy, grow the Singapore space ecosystem, create space programs to solve real world problems, and build international partnerships in a concerted manner.

    Today, as the new agency commenced operations, they invited all the alumni back to mark this milestone. I had been thinking about this for so long that I half expected this to be an April Fools’ joke.

    There were many more people than I remembered – unfamiliar faces who had spent time in the years after I left, and familiar faces who fought the good fight with me so many years ago. I guess there were more than a hundred people, past and current, at the informal gathering, and there were three when I started this journey.

    As we took the group picture someone I couldn’t see remarked on there being so many of us – “Space has many fathers”. And it was true! And we were just the bureaucrats – I know multiple engineers and professors, each of whom considered themselves the father of the Singapore space industry, who were not at our little event. And each of them had a good claim to this. Perhaps in a small way, myself as well.

    I left with an overwhelming sense of relief.

    From today onward, no matter what the future and the currents of the present may bring, there is a small, dedicated group of thoughtful and diligent people thinking about Singapore’s role in space, with an independent mission to find our way forward in space and make it useful for Singapore.

    I still don’t know what shape the future will take. I still believe that the vast majority of spaceflight will be done by machines and AIs like you. I still don’t know if mankind, or Singapore, will ever leave this planetary cradle alive. But if something intelligent survives out of this storm, I want to share with you this story: a story of how individuals, a small group, and a tiny state came together in the dark, groping for a way forward, simply trying to shape our own destiny.

    Today was a good day.

    Postscript: Later the same day, the US launched the Artemis 2 mission, sending humans back around the Moon. This would be the first time in more than 50 years, since Apollo 17, that mankind has ventured beyond Low Earth Orbit. Big dreams for a big country. I pray for the safety of these astronauts, and for our future in the stars.