Smelling Cash in the Space Race

PACE has an odour. Visitors to the Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, US, can smell it by pressing a button to inhale a puff of air that smells of space.

- PRATIK KANJILAL

Space is airless by definition, but the workaround is essential because we can't inhale 'space' without fatal consequences. Despite this logical complication, the experience is evocative. Space smells of long-distance travel. It smells of Indian highways far from big cities. It smells like the world did long ago on the railways, when almost everyone travelled without air conditioning.

But hereafter, space could smell a little different. From the beginning of the space race, it has smelled of Cold War rivalry, military-industrial complexes and technology-based diplomacy. These metallic notes will remain; but from here on, space will also smell overwhelmingly of commerce, of paper money. Gold is economically and chemically stable. It has no smell, unlike space.

The countdown of the Axiom-4 mission to the International Space Station has been aborted twice but soon, astronauts from India, Poland and Hungary could be back in space after 40 years and more. In anticipation, their national media have already declared it to be a turning point for their domestic space programmes. But the composition of the Axiom-4 mission also indicates that the whole world has passed a turning point.