Eau de Space

Capturing the smell of the high frontier in a bottle

According to people who have been there, space smells like "a burnt almond cookie" and "gunpowder." Or possibly "seared steak, raspberries, and rum." While those are hardly conventional scents for an everyday perfume, the concept of capturing the high frontier in a bottle was intriguing enough for me to help fund a Kickstarter campaign last July. The project had the added appeal of claiming to have extracted the fundamentals of Eau de Space from NASA via "determination, grit, a lot of luck, and a couple of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests."

Despite a great initial pitch, the perfume finally arrived after months of poor communication in what may be a metaphor for space exploration itself: extremely late, a bit banged up, and smelling unpleasantly of burning chemicals.