Astronauts reveal what space smells like and it sounds disgusting

Going to space is something that only a very few select people will get to do in their life time.

And whilst the concept might be exciting for some, for most of us back on Earth, it's actually pretty terrifying, as there's still so much we don't know about space.

Luckily for us, astronauts that have made the intense journey, can answer our burning questions - One of them being, what does it smell like up there?

If you've ever wondered this, 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, most people are probably referring to what it's like aboard something like the International Space Station (ISS) and for that, there's been quite a bit of discussion.

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It turns out that quite a few astronauts have discussed this question after coming back down to Earth from the ISS.

Steve Pearce, a biochemist and CEO of Omega Ingredients, has been trying to make a bespoke scent for NASA to show people what it smelled like up there.

In order to do this, happarently went through hours of interview footage and written memoirs to see what different astronauts reported smelling.

According to Live Science, the final combination mixed together "hot metal, burnt meat, burnt cakes, spent gunpowder and welding of metal".

We can't say that sounds the most appealing.

Going into a little more individual detail, American astronaut Don Pettit wrote a blog post for NASA back in 2012 where he described the smell.

He said: "The best description I can come up with is metallic; a rather pleasant sweet metallic sensation. It reminded me of my college summers where I labored for many hours with an arc welding torch repairing heavy equipment for a small logging outfit. It reminded me of pleasant sweet smelling welding fumes. That is the smell of space."

Whilst that doesn't sound as bad, there are repeat mentions in interviews with astronauts of the lurking smell of garbage.

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Sense of smell is very important up in space, as pointed out in a Reddit thread on this topic a few months ago.

American astronaut Scott Kelly found that his sense of smell helped him to work out when there was too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

With complex calibration required on devices to filter this out and keep people breathing healthy air, 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".

Well, you might not be able to visit the ISS, but you can at least image what it smells like.