Can’t afford to fly to space? Settle for smelling like it

Enlarge / "Listen—do you smell something?" (credit: QAI Publishing)

If you ask a US Navy submariner the most visceral part of the underwater and underway experience, you'll get the same answer almost every time—it's the smell. "Eau de Boat," as we sailors called it, is a unique combination of diesel fuel, machine oil, laundry hamper, and flatulence. To the best of my knowledge, nobody's ever attempted to bottle and sell Eau de Boat—but a Kickstarter campaign is trying to do the same thing for space travel.

But why, though?

In late June, the US National Space Council's Executive Secretary Scott Pace expressed his desire to support companies like Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin in developing minimal commercial space tourism—brief suborbital round trips which take a few people above the atmosphere, then return them to the same spot they started. Virgin Galactic even plans to send some NASA astronauts to the International Space Station, eventually.

But these are likely to be small and expensive affairs that very few people will get to experience, for several more decades at least. In the meantime, space enthusiasts can more accessibly and affordably experience the ISS to some degree in virtual reality. Even with six degrees of freedom, the experience is sharply limited.

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