The DSKY Moonwatch brings the 60-year-old NASA Apollo Guidance Computer to your wrist
Borna BošnjakIf you’ve been into watches for some time, you’ll likely know that the best watches get nicknames. Whether it’s the Pepsi, Dark Lord, or Nina Rindt, it has almost become a rite of passage for any watch looking to justify being called an icon. So, you’d have undoubtedly heard of the Omega Speedmaster Professional being referred to as the Moonwatch – in fact, Omega does so themselves. So, what the hell is a DSKY Moonwatch? To explain why this darling little piece of 1960s design is so cool, a brief revision of NASA’s Project Apollo is in order.
Apollo program and the original DSKY
As you might expect from a human endeavour on the bleeding edge of technology, the Apollo program was equipped with the latest and greatest to help the astronauts reach their ultimate goal – setting foot on the Moon. To help them along, some engineer nerds over at MIT decided to create the world’s first silicon IC computer – the Apollo Guidance Computer – intending it to be used by the command and Lunar modules for guidance, navigation, and control. As they happened to be a few years ahead of computer mice or touch screens being a thing (though not as many years as you might think), a different interface was needed for the AGC. This is where the DSKY comes in, short for “display and keyboard”. Without going into too much detail, the astronauts would essentially use the calculator-style keyboard to put in a numerical value corresponding to some command.
The left side served as an array of indicator and warning lights, while the right side was filled with seven-segment displays to show more detailed data. A potentially funny and certainly digressive tidbit I found while researching this – the AGC would save data in metric units, but the DSKY would display US customary units instead, a complexity my feeble European mind finds difficult to make sense of.
The DSKY Moonwatch
Anyway, onto the real topic of today. The DSKY Moonwatch is made by Apollo Instruments, and founder Mark Clayton proudly states two facts. This is not just your bog-standard calculator watch, nor is it a crowd-funded effort, and both claims are impressive in their own right. For starters, the DSKY watch is a recreation of the Apollo Guidance Computer interface, emulating some of the same functionality the astronauts would have used on board the NASA missions. While I personally have nothing against crowd-funded projects – they in fact sometimes yield a better end-product thanks to customer input – launching such a unique, niche proposition is commendable, and an indication of Clayton’s confidence in his product.
The design is obviously inspired by the original DSKY, but reduced in size to a case that’s 38mm across, 44mm lug-to-lug, and 13mm thick, which matches Clayton’s original idea of having something the size of an Apple Watch. Being rectangular, however, expect it to wear quite chunky, especially because there’s basically zero taper to the case, meaning that it’s 13mm thick everywhere. The steel case has been ceramic-coated, incorporating a keypad with actual, tactile switches, and the two display areas from the original DSKY – including a special filter that makes the modern LEDs glow like we’re back in the ’60s.
Mind you, the DSKY is being sold as a watch, which meant that Apollo Instruments also had to include a more standard, digital time display. The full array of features includes automatic daylight saving, GPS clock updates and navigation, but apart from the quirky look, the astronaut functions will be the main selling points. As such, you’ll be able to use the “verb” and “noun” buttons in combination with the numpad to perform actual sequences from the original Apollo Guidance Computer. This is all thanks to the original code that ran it, which was digitised in 2003, before being published to GitHub in 2016 by Chris Garry, a former NASA intern.
Apollo Instruments also thought of the programming-inclined, which warms my pretend-engineer heart. The company is teasing future electronic developments that will further emulate components of the AGC, as well as breadboard interfaces. At the moment, though, you’re limited to a USB charging port that can also be used to load your own code onto the watch, but I’d say that’s already pretty good. Apollo Instruments is hoping to ship the first batches to customers in Q1 of 2025, with further production mostly limited by the complexity of the project, rather than numbers. At £659, it’s not cheap enough to be an impulse purchase, but for those with an interest in space flight or with a particularly creative electrical engineering mind, the DSKY could be a lot of fun. Is it a bonafide space watch? Not quite, but it certainly has the heart of one.