If you ask a United States Navy scuba diver for the most visceral part of the ongoing and underwater experience, you’ll almost always get the same answer: it’s the smell. “Eau de Boat”, as we sailors call it, is a unique combination of diesel fuel, machine oil, laundry basket and flatulence. As far as I know, no one has tried to bottle and sell Eau de Boat, but a Kickstarter campaign is trying to do the same for space travel.
But why?
In late June, the Executive Secretary of the National Space Council of the United States, Scott Pace, expressed his desire to support companies like Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin in the development of minimal commercial space tourism: short suborbital round trips. They take some people above the atmosphere, and then return them to the same place where Virgin Galactic started.He even plans to send some NASA astronauts to the International Space Station, eventually. But it is likely that these are small and expensive issues that very few people will experience, at least for several more decades. Meanwhile, space enthusiasts can experience ISS in a more accessible and affordable way to some degree in virtual reality. Even with six degrees of freedom, experience is very limited.
Oculus and its competitors are unlikely to find a way to simulate microgravity, but if you want to smell ISS as you virtually go through it, that might be an option.
A brief history of space stench
Believe it or not, this is not the first effort to contain the smell of space travel. NASA tries to simulate the experience of manning its vehicles and executing its missions as faithfully as possible during ground training, leaving its astronauts as prepared and safe during reality, and if you believe in the Space Kickstarter Eau campaign, that includes the smell.
Decades ago, NASA hired specialists to develop the “smell of space” to help train astronauts before launching into orbit. NASA’s goal of simulating space during training is to eliminate any surprises astronauts may experience in outer space. Practice makes perfect, and it’s Rocket Science. The Smell of Space has been locked up behind “Need to Know”, field training only for astronauts and bureaucracy for years. Through court determination, determination, good luck, and a couple of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, we got him out.
We are not quite sure how well this claim fits reality. The Kickstarter campaign itself is notably lacking in links to back up its claims. In a CNN interview, Eau de Space founder and chemist Steve Pearce said that NASA had hired him to develop the simulated scent in 2008, which would be a cool story in itself, but it doesn’t coincide with the campaign of Kickstarter for “decades” old “program that had to be discovered through FOIA.
Finding astronauts willing to describe what space travel smells is not difficult: Peggy Whitson described the ISS as smelling of bitter, smoking gunpowder in 2002, and Don Pettit describes eau de spacewalk as a sweet, metallic scent similar to the fumes of arc welding.
Describing his 2008 job for NASA, Pearce himself told the Atlantic in 2012 to “imagine sweaty feet and a musty body odor, mix that with nail polish remover and gasoline … then you will get closer.” This doesn’t sound like a commercially viable product, but it certainly sounds like Eau de Boat to me.
This is not the first time that a company claims to offer the bottled scent of space to consumers: Aviation company Lockheed Martin produced a limited batch of an aroma that it named “Vector” for April Fool’s Day last year. Our own Eric Berger had a chance to try Vector, and declared it dark, musky, charcoal-like, and similar to freshly spread mulch.
Caelum pedestrem warning
Pearce’s Kickstarter campaign does not contain any description of what the Eau de Space product really smells like. You can faithfully reproduce the mostly human funk of a manned machine with recycled air, or you can do without human smells and focus on the strong, acrid, ionized odor that comes from a spacewalk. If you want to find out, it will cost you $ 15 per 4-ounce bottle.
