wrote in message
oups.com...
The returning space tourist according to a news reader on this mornings
news states that "space smells like a burned cookie" An interesting
tidbit for those of us into the minutae of what it must be likei
................Doc


From 'Pioneering Space' (1986),
chapter One



SPACEFARER'S

DIARY







When is the exact moment one crosses the threshold between Earth and space?
Perhaps it is when one first perceives the huge bending of the horizon, the
first glimpse of the Earth's curvature. Or perhaps it is when one lets go of
a pencil and it floats, as American astronaut William Lenoir and Russian
cosmonaut Valeriy Ryumin did. The first perception of crossing over is
whenever the mind perceives the departure from the familiar. "There was
convincing evidence of weightlessness as soon as I released the flight plan
or a pencil," Ryumin noted in his inflight diary. For the first time, the
mind verifies the bizarre, alien, unearthliness of space, and says, "Yes,
this is it. I am here, in outer space."





Once the cosmonauts had docked their spacecraft to the station, they
prepared to go over into it. The transfer tunnel was filled with air, and
one of them entered it to unlatch the station's front hatch, which had spent
the previous several months exposed to airless space and searing sunlight.
Later he recalled a momentary impression: "In the docking unit we sensed the
odor of burnt steel -- the odor of space."