Become the nose of NASA.
If George Aldrich, an expert at NASA, hadn’t talked about his work on Reddit, very few of us would have known that the US Space Agency was in such a strange position: An appraisal team dedicated to sniffing. objects before they are launched into space.
Even Aldrich only needs to graduate from high school to work in this position. And it’s also an extremely good opportunity for advancement. After smelling objects for a while, Aldrich was trained by NASA to become a technician in the chemistry room.
Now, he is a top chemist at NASA, awarded the Silver Snoopy Sniffer Award for his dedication to more than 40 years, with about 800 flight safety missions at the US Space Agency.
George Aldrich – dubbed the nose of NASA.
“I’ve been a chemist at NASA for 44 years ,” Aldrich wrote in a recent Ask Me Anything thread on Reddit describing his bizarre career. “I mainly do toxicity tests on objects before they go into space.”
” I’m also a volunteer on NASA’s odor assessment committee. We smell all the items in the International Space Station’s living quarters, checking for unpleasant odors that could cause astronauts nauseated astronauts, putting their performance and the mission at risk”.
Correct. It is a real and necessary task. It’s much more important than you think, not only because some types of smoke are poisonous, but also because… you can imagine being stuck on the cramped International Space Station with a horrible smell would be. how?
On Earth, you can go crazy when someone cuts onions in the office or goes to the bathroom without closing the door. But the air at least diluted those unpleasant odors. On space stations and spacecraft, there’s even less air.
In fact, in 1976, the Russians had to cancel a flight to space, because the astronauts could not stand the smell inside their spacecraft.
Smell can affect the success or failure of a task – just for fun.
But NASA foresaw that. They knew they had to check the smell of every object before sending them into space.
The odor assessment process works like this: 5 volunteers on NASA’s odor assessment team will smell each material and then rate their discomfort from 0 to 4. If a certain odor exceeds a 2, 5, it will fail the test.
“We didn’t see what objects looked like before we smelled them. I was almost in a state of blindness. They didn’t want us to be prejudiced [with objects]. We weren’t allowed to look either. on it after we smelled it ,” Aldrich wrote.
Before taking the smell test, the volunteers on the assessment panel will be checked by a nurse, to make sure they are not sick and that their sense of smell is working at its best.
Normally, objects sent to the International Space Station have been carefully calculated and checked. But sometimes, a material with a certain odor still passes the previous rounds of testing. That’s why the noses of volunteers on NASA’s odor panel are so important.
“Velcro straps, we test them, and they smell like heaven,” Aldrich tells of a prime example.
“They tested each component separately [of the velcro straps], so when put together they should have passed the toxicity test and the odor test.
But when sent into space, one of the astronauts unlocked the velcro and they immediately smelled on the spot. On a scale of 0-4, one person scores 3.6 and another scores 3.8. It’s annoying and scary.”
Aldrich sniffed the unlabelled chemical vials.
NASA’s Odor Evaluation Committee was formed after the tragedy of January 27, 1967. During the first test simulation for the Apollo-Saturn mission, a flare of fire engulfed the spacecraft prototype and killed three astronauts.
This tragedy rocked the United States, and to prevent it from happening again, NASA had to redesign the blueprints for the ship.
As part of the redesign process, they decided to do some thorough material testing. NASA’s first priority is testing for combustible materials. Smell testing is at priority number six.
Now, odor testing is still used for new materials intended to be sent into space, including spacesuits and EV clothing for astronauts.
It seems like every nose in the world is the same, but Aldrich’s nose knows what to expect. During his career, he performed more than 800 sniffing missions for NASA.
In honor of Aldrich’s work, NASA presented him with the Silver Snoopy Sniffer award, in recognition of his efforts to ensure safe flight.
Aldrich and his students.
Although Aldrich’s sense of smell may impress you, he didn’t start his career because of it. Aldrich said the profession chose him.
“I’m really lucky to be in this position [within NASA]. My dad doesn’t work there and I never thought I was qualified,” he wrote on Reddit.
By the time he graduated from high school, Aldrich joined a team of 5-6 at the local fire department, also on “sniffing” duties. There, he met the chief of the fire department, who told Aldrich about the NASA program.
Aldrich recounted on Reddit:
He said to me: “George, you are 18 years old, you are young, join the smell assessment committee for astronauts”. And so I started that career in 1974.
As a member of the odor panel, you won’t have to work in the lab. But at the time that [NASA’s] chemistry lab was looking for a technician, I said, ” I had two years of chemistry in high school and four years of math.”
They replied that I was qualified and they would train me. In 1978, I started working as a C-tech, then B-tech then A-tech, now I’m at the top, a specialist.
When Aldrich started his career at NASA, he only had a high school diploma.
However, even as an expert, there was one thing that flew into space that Aldrich never smelled: Astronauts.
” Humans stink, but there’s not much we can do about it,” Aldrich wrote. ” They tried to keep themselves clean with antibacterial agents. Because of the zero gravity environment, they couldn’t properly shower, also to save water. [So] people always stink, haha, there’s nothing we can do about them.”