An Indescribable Russian Space Stink
Plus, holiday fermentation fun
I have a vivid childhood memory of reading a story in an oversized book, possibly one of the Boys’ Life anthologies, about astronauts in a space capsule that had sprung a leak. It was accompanied by an illustration of a wispy cloud seeping into the capsule’s interior. I was too young to grasp that space is a vacuum and that a hole in the hull would result in pressurized air escaping from capsule. Nevertheless, the picture troubled me: why would outer space look smokey?
That image was brought to mind by the November 23rd news report of the Russian resupply spacecraft Progress docking with the International Space Station.
After opening the Progress spacecraft’s hatch, the Roscosmos cosmonauts noticed an unexpected odor and observed small droplets . . .
An unexpected odor? Well, what did it smell like?
According to Anatoly Zak of Russian Space Web, a reliable independent website, the smell was “toxic” and prompted the Russian cosmonauts to immediately close the hatch leading to the Progress spacecraft . . .
I imagine that after years of habitation the interior of the ISS smells pretty ripe, so “toxic” is impressive but not very specific.
What could have caused the bad smell? Perhaps a payload technician at Baikonur Cosmodrome inadvertently left part of his Kazakhstan lunch in the Progress—he may have spilled some kumys (fermented mare’s milk) or dropped a piece of his horsemeat sandwich.
Ars Technica gives a different clue:
On the US segment of the station, NASA astronaut Don Pettit said he smelled something akin to “spray paint.”
This suggests a solvent leak of some sort—among the supplies being delivered was “fuel.” In any event, after deploying air scrubbers in the cargo vessel, the smell eventually disappeared.
Locating and identifying a smell is not easy, even for people with the relevant knowledge. A chemist friend of mine spent days searching for the source of a malodor in his fridge. My recently gifted bottle of homemade kimchi briefly came under suspicion but was later exonerated.
Which reminds me, it’s almost time to prepare my traditional batch of Christmas-chi. I bought a new bottle of fermented shrimp paste and have a fresh bag of gochugaru all ready to go.
P.S. I picked up my kimchi fundamentals from the offbeat Bon Appétit video “Brad Makes Kimchi.” Bon Appétit has since gone woke and probably wouldn’t allow Brad to demo kimchi because cultural appropriation yadda yadda, but I find his Jerseyoid persona refreshingly nekulturny.