Lockheed Martin, a major US defense contractor, has bottled the smell of space, purportedly creating “a scent that transcends our planet and brings the essence of space down to Earth,” according to the headline on Business Insider.
The “samples” of the smell of space are based on the testimony of former NASA astronaut Tony Antonelli, who now leads the Orion spacecraft mission, who is also in the high-quality YouTube video accompanying this story.
In the video, Antonelli says that while working on the assembly of the international space station, he opened the hatch for a group of astronauts who had just completed a spacewalk, and it was then that he discovered that space actually has a smell.
“I was completely blown away. After over a decade of training, no one had told me that space smells,” Antonelli says in the video. “The smell was strong and unique, nothing like anything I had ever smelled on Earth before,” he said, describing the scent as “some kind of metallic mixture of other things that I just didn’t know how to describe.”
Now Antonelli’s description of his first smell of space is absolutely true, according to Alex Walker, a spokesman for Lockheed Martin Space. However, Lockheed Martin declined to make the scent available to reporters before the public announcement.
In a statement, according to Military.com, the company describes the new fragrance, called Vector: “This out-of-this-world scent blends metallic notes to create a clean scent with a sterile feel, balanced by subtle, fiery undertones that burn off like vapor in the atmosphere.”
Walker told Business Insider, “We actually developed fragrance samples based on Tony’s guidance. His whole story of the smell of space, we took his guidance down to a local perfumery in Denver and bottled it.”
What does space smell like? With the help of Space Shuttle Discovery pilot Tony Antonelli, @LockheedMartin has bottled the SMELL OF SPACE with their new fragrance, Vector. #itsactuallyreal pic.twitter.com/dC7BwX9B5h
— Emily Calandrelli (@TheSpaceGal) April 1, 2019
The company created three different scents and Lockheed Martin got to choose which one smelled like space. “It’s like one of those fragrance samples you’d get at the mall,” Walker said, adding that the company produced roughly 2,000 sample bottles to hand out at next week’s Space Symposium in Colorado, from April 8 to 11.
“No one is better suited to develop the preferred fragrance for tomorrow’s explorers,” the company said in a statement. “For those unable to experience the smell of space in zero gravity in person, Lockheed Martin is making a limited run of Vector available.”
