British Watch Heading to Moon on Rover This Year

Before astronauts return to the moon in 2028, a British-made watch will already be ticking away on the lunar surface.

Bremont, a British watchmaker, is sending its new Supernova Chronograph to the moon aboard a California startup's rover called FLIP. The watch will launch as part of Astrobotic's Griffin Mission One, expected to land at the lunar south pole in the second half of 2025.

This isn't just a publicity stunt. The mission represents a genuine engineering challenge and a remarkable turnaround story for lunar exploration.

FLIP (Flex Lunar Innovation Platform) was built in roughly one year by aerospace startup Astrolab after NASA paused its own rover project in 2024. When contractor Astrobotic suddenly needed a replacement vehicle, Astrolab signed on within a month and delivered a finished rover from scratch.

The 1,058-pound rover features an innovative wheel design that could change how we explore the moon. Its hyper-deformable wheels, made from silicone, composite, and stainless steel, create a soft contact surface with the terrain without shattering in the moon's extreme cold.

Traditional rubber tires would become glass-like and break at lunar nighttime temperatures of around negative 328 degrees Fahrenheit. Astrolab founder Jaret Matthews compares the wheels to letting air out of off-road tires to spread the load over a larger area.

The Supernova watch faces its own extreme test. Only the 107-gram watch head will make the journey, glued vertically into a special housing between FLIP's front wheels where HD cameras can monitor it.

The mechanical watch relies on motion to wind itself, but FLIP will hibernate during the two-week lunar nights to conserve power. Without movement, the watch will stop after its 62-hour power reserve runs down.

Why This Inspires

This mission shows how quickly innovation can happen when companies work together toward ambitious goals. Astrolab turned an unexpected opportunity into a finished lunar rover in about 12 months, solving complex engineering problems along the way.

The watch itself tells a story about human curiosity. Will the rover's movements provide enough motion to restart the mechanism in one-sixth Earth's gravity? Nobody knows for sure.

"We will learn along the way," says Bremont CEO Davide Cerrato. "But that's what is exciting. It projects us into a thinking process that is absolutely out of the box."

FLIP will gather data on lunar dust, test protective coatings, and attempt to survive lunar hibernation, which would be a first for a US rover. The mission is one-way: both rover and watch will remain permanently on the moon.

While Swiss watchmakers Omega and Breitling are supplying watches to astronauts on upcoming missions, Bremont will be first back to the lunar surface since 1972, proving that sometimes the race goes to the bold and the fast.