Telha
Well, there’s a quick and easy technical answer: true space is a vacuum and you wouldn’t be able to smell anything whatsoever up there. However, what people likely mean is what it smells like aboard something like the International Space Station (ISS).
View this post on Instagram
Most astronauts say there are hints of hot metal, burnt meat, burnt cakes, spent gunpowder, and welding of metal”.
Those are some pretty industrial smells, which perhaps shouldn’t come as a surprise given that the ISS is basically a metallic series of tubes full of machinery and equipment.
American astronaut Scott Kelly found that his sense of smell was incredibly important up in space – it helped him to work out when there was too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
View this post on Instagram
Kelly reported that after some time in space he could “sense the levels with a high degree of accuracy based only on the symptoms I’ve come to know so well: headaches, congestion, burning eyes, irritability. Perhaps the most dangerous symptom is impairment to cognitive function”.
