In 2010 a good friend of mine, Patrick, came up to me and said: I'm going to make a watch of material from a real space rocket and establish a new watch brand that is more innovative than all the others! Everybody called him crazy (including me), but he pursued his idea with great enthusiasm and was determined to make the idea come true. One of the very few places to get material from a real space rocket lies in Kazakhstan: The rocket launches at the Russian Cosmodrom in Baikonur and at an altitude of 40 to 50 kilometers the four boosters blast off and fall down into the steppe of Kazakhstan. Those boosters were our object of desire. Since we knew that some Kazakh people collect the rocket boosters and resell the material, we went to meet this businessman and buy material for the watches. To make the story short: We met the guy, bought the material and Patrick created his first watch at the end of 2013.
In 2016 Patrick planned to launch a new edition and therefore needed new material. In order to proove that we definitely use rocket pieces he wanted to be in the steppe when the boosters come down to earth. The launch was scheduled on October 19th 2016. We packed our bags, took a plane and jumped on a taxi that drove us on a 10 hours ride to our starting point. The following photographs tell the story of this trip. Our Kazakh partner agreed to guide us through the steppe to find the boosters and convince the Russians that we could take photographs an film. It was an adventure: The underside of the car started to burn because the dry gras got stuck, we searched for the boosters for more than four hours in the endless steppe, we brought some bottles of Vodka as present to get the permission and after all we drove back through the steppe in the darkness with our drunken Kazakh guide after he drank all the bottles with the fellow Russians.
Link to the extended photo story: Second Journey to the Soyuz Rocket
