WORLD OF WATCHES
From Earth to Orbit
Kelton Temby, Chief Engineer at Vast, sits down with Empire Luxe to discuss why putting humans into orbit remains one of the most demanding engineering problems of our era.
Human spaceflight is not a scaled-up version of robotic exploration — it is a fundamentally different discipline. Every system has to be redundant, every interface has to be intuitive under stress, and every component has to survive launch loads, vacuum, radiation and re-entry without margin for error.
Why orbit is hard
Reaching low Earth orbit requires accelerating a spacecraft to roughly 7.8 kilometres per second. Sustaining a human inside that envelope means managing oxygen, pressure, thermal swings of over 200°C, and ionising radiation — all while preserving the crew's ability to perform.
“Reliability isn't a feature you add at the end. It's the geometry of the entire program.”
Engineering for humans
Vast's approach mirrors the philosophy that has guided fine watchmaking for over a century: precision, redundancy and a deep respect for the wearer — or in their case, the crew. Each subsystem is tested as if a life depends on it, because one does.
It is this shared obsession with reliability that brought Empire Luxe and Vast together — a partnership rooted in instruments that must perform when there is no second chance.