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There are plenty of unanswered questions regarding space and the wider galaxy, yet one thing that appears to fascinate most people more than anything is how outer space smells, and one retired NASA astronaut has revealed all.
Spending time in space is the dream for every astronaut out there, as you get to look into the endlessness of the galaxy and see Earth from a front row seat, and many are desperate to get back as soon as possible — even after being stranded on the International Space Station for almost a year.
One thing that might put some hopeful astronauts off from pursuing their dream of space travel though is the smell, as the mysterious odor that you'll come in contact with when leaving Earth's atmosphere is not what you might expect.
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Thankfully one former NASA astronaut has revealed exactly what she thinks space smells like in a new interview, and it'll help you get a good idea of whether you could put up with it for days and potentially even months on end.
Nicole Stott, a former NASA astronaut, engineer, and aquanaut, recently spoke with LADbible Stories on YouTube to answer a barrage of space-related questions, revealing countless fascinating truths about her time at the space agency.
While she ranked her favorite planets, shared how her body changed during her time in space, and also revealed whether it's possible to have sex on board the International Space Station, one of her most fascinating answers regarded the odor that living in space has.
"Well, it would be a bad day if you went out there and tried to smell it yourself, so don't do that," Stott joked, before revealing that space has a "very distinct, kind of sweet metallic smell."
While it's obviously hard to accurately describe something that most people will never get to experience in their lives, she compares it to the smell you get when opening a can of soup, or what you might get in your nose if a car's radiator was overheating.
One caveat of this smell is that space itself is completely odorless due to the lack of oxygen, meaning that if you someone managed to survive without a suit outside of a space station or spacecraft you wouldn't be able to smell anything, so what Stott is describing is more the smell of the craft or station itself.
She adds that you can get a sense of this odor by smelling the spacecraft or space suits when astronauts return back to Earth as it's carried through them, and it's likely due to the hot metals that are present throughout almost every part of the process.
One scientist has even tried to recreate this smell himself so that other people can share the sensation of astronauts, as biochemist Steve Pearce experimented with different odors to produce one that has properties of "hot metal, burnt meat, burnt cakes, spent gunpowder, and welding of metal," as reported by Live Science.
Now, that also doesn't account for the smells that might be produced by astronauts themselves while on board the ISS – including whether its possible to get a whiff of any excrement that might be floating through the station – but the general odor you'll have when spending time in space is one that is undeniably metallic.
