That appears to be the word out there. Anousheh Ansari, the first female tourist on space just came back from her journey saying the following:
he time went by really slowly, but finally the moment arrived and they were ready to open the hatch. Mike and Misha called me closer and told me to take a good whiff because this would be the first time I would smell “SPACE.”
They said it is a very unique smell. As they pulled the hatch open on the Soyuz side, I smelled “SPACE.” It was strange… kind of like burned almond cookie. I said to them, “It smells like cooking” and they both looked at me like I was crazy and exclaimed:”Cooking!”
I said, “Yes… sort of like something is burning… I don’t know it is hard to explain…
Anousheh keept a blog all this time on http://spaceblog.xprize.org/2006/09/22/the-trip-up/ and there you can read her experience on space; it’s very interesting to read because the author is a normal person, so it’s written very casual and it focus on those small things we would notice if we were on her shoes during this space trip.
It actually smells!
A BoingBoing reader, Jennifer Saylor, says that in a 2001 “Fresh Air” interview, NASA astronaut Capt. Jerry Linenger describes the smell of space this way:
Flying into MIR, it smells sort of like dirty sweat socks in a guys’ locker room. Actual smell of space, though, that’s a very interesting question. When we would open a hatch, for example, that was exposed to the vacuum of space, uh, there’s always a double hatch, and so you open the one hatch, you now have the pure smell of space. And it’s a uh, tough — you know, any aroma is tough to describe, but it has a distinct smell, and it’s sort of a burned-out, uh, after-the-fire, the next-morning-in-your-fireplace sort of smell. And that’s the real smell of the vacuum of space.
From the Wikipedia: If you ask me, I would say that it’s because the sun is burning or because the universe was created by a big explosion (the big bang!), but who knows!
She won’t be able to smell those!Ansari has received multiple honors, including the George Mason University Entrepreneurial Excellence Award, the George Washington University Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award, and the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award for the Southwest Region. While under her leadership, Telecom Technologies, Inc. earned recognition as one of Inc. magazine’s 500 fastest-growing companies and one of Deloitte & Touche’s Fast 500 technology companies. She was listed in Fortune magazine’s “40 under 40″ list in 2001 and honored by Working Woman magazine as the winner of the 2000 National Entrepreneurial Excellence award.
The Ansari family was recently honored with an Orbit Award by the National Space Society and Space Tourism Society for underwriting the Ansari X Prize.
