Presumably, it’s not operating in a vacuum.
Doesn’t that article say Speedmasters X-33 have also been used? Those are lightweight and have temperature-compensated quartz. And possibly LCD.
I meant the part about receiving free merchandise in exchange for the publicity may be illegal. I believe NASA buys the Fisher pens at a fair price. But I’m not a lawyer and I don’t know for sure, I just know there are a lot of rules regarding in-kind contributions. It would definitely be illegal for an individual astronaut to receive a $2000 (?) watch for free in exchange for taking it to space.
Perhaps this has already been mentioned: Most of the cost of aeronautics, especially space, is in research, development, testing & certification, not the marginal production cost of the item itself. That high fixed cost is amortized by the number of items bought. If it costs 10 million dollars to research, develop, test and certify an item, it costs that everytime you want to introduce a different kind of item for the first time. So, an Omega Speedmaster may cost 5000$ a piece but if the whole fixed cost of the acceptance process a new watch is 10 000 000$, even switching to a cheap 20$ drugstore watch would end up costing 10 000 020$.
The high fixed cost also acts as an entry barrier, creating less competition and a more captive buyer base, usually a monopoly or oligopoly.
You can see this for lots of certified products in aeronautics or medicine.
Ahhh, gotcha. And, I’m no expert, but it seems to be a bit of a gray area.
There was an incident with Apollo 15, in which a German stamp dealer gave the crew a number of “stamp covers,” with the understanding that the astronauts would keep some, and give the rest back to the dealer, the covers having been to the Moon (and, thus, worth a fortune).
It wasn’t technically illegal, but the part about giving some of the covers back to the dealer for sale apparently was against NASA rules, and the three astronauts were disciplined (though, it also appears that earlier Apollo crews had engaged in similar activities, to which a blind eye was turned).
If anyone interpreted the responses in this thread to mean “they use mechanical watches because LCDs don’t work in temperature extremes,” that’s not entirely accurate. If a particular component has a narrow operating temperature range, it can still be used in space. It just needs to be part of a system that insures that component stays within the temperature range. Space hardware often contain “survival heaters” that prevent components from getting too cold. Most electronics are designed with conductive cooling, to make sure they don’t overheat. All spacecraft have radiators to radiate away excess heat.
So it’s entirely possible to design an LCD wristwatch to work in space. But a commercial wristwatch that isn’t designed for that environment may not work.
It’s an EVA suit. You’d be hard pressed to find a natural environment closer to a more perfect vacuum than space.
I was referring more to the comments that claimed LCDs can’t work in space, especially the one from Peter Morris which included an excerpt from The Martian. Their use (or lack thereof) in wrist watches notwithstanding, comments in this thread suggested that LCDs can’t work in space. Possibly because the liquid can’t hold up in a vacuum. But the fact that the current EVA suit uses an LCD disproves this notion.
And now that I think about it, I watched a video recently poking fun of the fact that a NASA astronaut on EVA at the ISS did not know how to operate his GoPro camera. He specifically asked what the “NO SD” error message meant. The GoPro is commercial, off-the-shelf technology taken in space. It isn’t specifically designed for space. Yet, its LCD functions in that environment. I think Andy Weir might be wrong about this one.
That excerpt is about consumer electronics. The LCDs in consumer laptops are not designed to work in vacuum (e.g. sealed to prevent outgas). Same goes for wristwatches, which is why consumer digital wristwatches don’t work in space, but consumer mechanical wristwatches do.
But it’s very possible to design LCD modules that are properly sealed and can be used in vacuum. As I said earlier, there already are space-qualified LCD modules. I’m sure the LCD panels on the EVA suits are examples of these. (It’s also possible that the display and control module is hermetically sealed and connected to the suit, in which case the LCD is in air and its temperature is regulated by the suit’s life support system.)
I don’t know the details of that specific unit, but an LCD in an EVA suit might not be exposed to the vacuum or temperature extremes of space at all. After all, the whole point of an EVA suit is to provide an environment with normal, Earthlike atmosphere and temperature. If the LCD is inside with the astronaut (for instance, to provide a HUD on the inside of the visor), it would need almost no special consideration at all.
I’m not sure it’s even an LCD.
Most official references call it a “character display,” and many people (even technical ones) call all those displays LCDs, even if they are some other technology, like Vacuum Fluorescent or OLED.
Indeed. Many people don’t know what LCD means, and think it is a generic term for a display. I have lost count of the number of times I have hear people talking about the “LCD display” (note the redundant word) in the Apollo DSKY. It was an electroluminescent display. Everything inside the Apollo capsule was designed to operate in a vacuum,There wasn’t exactly much air inside when space walks were occurring, as well as the need to operate in the event that an emergency required, or caused, loss of cabin pressure.
Making a mechanical watch work under the pretty stringent tests NASA imposed would not have been trivial. A hot watch in a vacuum could easily have ended up with all the oil solidifying, and so on. I remember reading an article many many years ago that said some of the other watches tested failed due to simple issues, such as the glass popping off in a vacuum. Which in retrospect isn’t a massive surprise. Designing a watch to cope with a full atmosphere of pressure from within - and thus probably over ten pounds force trying to pull the glass off, isn’t something many designers would have thought about.
The well known restrictions on giving things to US government agencies are actually restrictions on locking government agencies into contracts that haven’t been formally approved.
Probably not really relevant to NASA, since the chance of NASA selecting a watch just because it was cheap are probably small.
The mechanical watch is not going to be affected by EMP’s. What if the EVA takes them past a working antenna ? What if they get hit by a gamma ray ? “Although nearby GRBs hitting Earth with a destructive shower of gamma rays are only hypothetical events, high energy processes across the galaxy have been observed to affect the Earth’s atmosphere”. I take that to mean that the amount of shielding required makes the EVA quartz watch impractical… The quartz requires too much shielding and there’s no avoiding that.
It probably isn’t that bad - for the most part. A GRB capable of actually wrecking a quartz watch is going to wreck the astronaut wearing it just as badly.
The point about ionizing radiation or EM interference is important however. The tiny silicon state machine inside any electronic watch is easily flipped to an illegal state - and the watch stops. Quick power cycle and all is good. You don’t need to damage it - just flip a bit. There are of course radiation hardened silicon processes, but we are no longer talking a COTS watch. Shielding would not really be all that hard, but again, not COTS.
What’s wrong with a pocket watch? Put a little pouch on the space suit or a bit of velcro on the back. And in free-fall, a pocket watch, being on a chain, can be positioned conveniently in your field of vision rather than have to be fixed to the wrist of the space suit.
From a practical standpoint, watches went the way of the pocket watch some 10 years ago. There may be people who think that the both of them are equally quaint products.
Pocket watches dominate the market now. We call them smart phones.
If pocket watches really come back, happily we can see a resurgence of the “glasses, wallet, watch” joke without having to explain it.
The inside too? That’s bad.