Smelling cash in the space race
Space 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. 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 and surprising. 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.
The crew led by American Peggy Whitson will be taken to orbit on Elon Musk's commercial Dragon launch vehicle, and the project is a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency, ISRO and the Houston firm Axiom Space, whose most ambitious project is the first commercial space station. The purpose of the collaboration is to facilitate a range of commercial activities in space, from scientific research to space tourism. Space is about to be opened up commercially, just like the world was opened like an oyster by the European Age of Exploration.
About 40 years ago, when India, Poland and Hungary last sent their citizens into space, it was a domain where national governments showed off their technological prowess to compete for geopolitical gains. These three countries made a place for themselves in space under the aegis of Interkosmos, a Russian state programme launched in 1967 to help satellite nations of the USSR and other socialist nations like Afghanistan and Cuba reach space. Non-aligned nations Syria and India were also under its umbrella.
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