Bell & Ross has spent three decades building watches around cockpit instruments, so it was only a matter of time before the brand looked beyond the atmosphere. The BR-03 Space Mission, limited to 999 pieces, follows last year’s BR-03 Astro, which replaced conventional hands with a small moving scene of the Earth and the Moon. This new chapter adds a vehicle to that scene.

The vehicle is the Vortex, a concept developed by Dassault Aviation. The name abbreviates “Véhicule Orbital Réutilisable de Transport et d’Exploration”, and the idea is a reusable spaceplane that takes off and lands on a runway like an aircraft. For a house founded in 1994 by Carlos-A. Rosillo and Bruno Belamich, two friends who shared a passion for aviation, and which already partners with the Patrouille de France and the Rafale Solo Display, a Dassault project is a logical collaborator.

Reading time might seem confusing, but it is quite the contrary. A transparent rotating disc printed with the Earth and the Moon turns at the pace of an hour hand, with the Moon pointing to the hour. The nose of the Vortex travels around the dial to mark the minutes. A small red dot represents Mars, a quiet hint at where the spaceplane might head next.

The case is 41 mm wide and 10.60 mm thick, made from micro-blasted black ceramic, and an anti-reflective sapphire crystal with water resistance of 100 metres. The black aventurine dial scatters glass with flecks that give the impression of a starry sky behind the Vortex, while the inside sits the automatic BR-CAL.325, which delivers hours and minutes with a 54-hour power reserve. The Space Mission comes with black rubber and synthetic fabric straps, finished with a pin buckle in steel with a matt black PVD coating.

There is no additional module or crowded sub-dial, and the watch still performs only the two functions every watch performs. What changes is the story of space travel from the Astro to Space Mission, rethinking how those functions are displayed, which keeps the square BR-03 case recognisable while turning it into a porthole. With two celestial references now released, the brand appears to be building a series, and the Space Mission sets a high bar for whatever comes next.

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