Fortis Cosmonautis watches

The Fortis Cosmonautis watches carry the brand's ties to spaceflight: the Official Cosmonauts Chronograph, the Official Cosmonauts Day-Date and the Spacematic. The story starts in 1962, when Fortis built the Spacematic, an automatic made to cope with extreme conditions and swings in temperature. In 1994 the Star City training centre in Russia chose the Official Cosmonauts Chronograph as issued equipment after endurance tests, and that September cosmonauts wore it aboard the Mir station during the Soyuz TM-19 mission. Fortis has supplied crewed missions authorised by the Russian space agency ever since.

The first Official Cosmonauts Chronograph had a 38 mm steel case and a Lemania 5100. In 2003 Fortis replaced it with the B-42 version: the case grew to 42 mm, easier to work in bulky space gloves, and the Lemania gave way to an automatic ETA 7750. These chronographs use that 42 mm case, 15.5 mm thick, with a black dial and sapphire crystal; the steel version is the 638.10.11. The Day-Date models keep the 42 mm diameter but slim down to 12 mm, in steel (647.10.11) or titanium (647.27.11).

Mars-500 was an experiment by Russia, the European Space Agency and China at Moscow's Institute of Biomedical Problems: six crew members spent 520 days sealed in a facility simulating a journey to Mars, and each wore a Fortis automatic chronograph. Fortis marked it with Mars 500 versions of both the chronograph (638.28.13) and the Day-Date (647.28.13), in titanium. The Monolith versions (638.18.31 and 647.18.31) are steel; the Pitch Black Day-Date (647.28.81) is titanium.

The Spacematic models are the smaller watches, 40 mm across and 12 mm thick in steel. The Classic and the Counterrotation pair black dials (623.10.41 and 623.10.51) with white ones (623.10.42 and 623.10.52), and the Spacematic Pilot Professional (623.10.71) has a PVD-coated sibling (623.18.71).