The US defense contractor building the F-35 says it has bottled the smell of space for a weird new fragrance
- Lockheed Martin, the US defense contractor building the F-35, has recreated the smell of space and bottled it in a new fragrance called Vector.
- The announcement was part of a very elaborate April Fools' Day joke in which Lockheed actually made samples based on the testimony of former NASA astronaut Tony Antonelli.
- This was the company's first foray into April Fools' Day, and they went all out.
Lockheed Martin, a major US defense contractor, has bottled the smell of space, purportedly creating "a scent that transcends our planet and brings the essence of space down to Earth."
The new scent "blends metallic notes to create a clean scent with a sterile feel, balanced by subtle, fiery undertones that burn off like vapor in the atmosphere," the company explained on its website, adding that now "men, women and children everywhere [can] smell like they're floating through the cosmos."
Vector, "the preferred fragrance for tomorrow's explorers," was announced just in time for April Fools' Day and is the company's first foray into the holiday.
You won't be seeing this strange new fragrance at your local department store, but the scent does exist, a Lockheed Martin spokesman told Business Insider.
In the remarkably high-quality video Lockheed produced for its big April Fools' Day prank, Tony Antonelli, a retired NASA astronaut who now leads the Orion spacecraft mission, describes his first encounter with the smell of space.
While working on the assembly of the international space station, he opened the hatch for a group of astronauts who had just completed a spacewalk, and it was then that he discovered that space actually has a smell.
"I was completely blown away. After over a decade of training, no one had told me that space smells," Antonelli says in the video.
"The smell was strong and unique, nothing like anything I had ever smelled on Earth before," he said, describing the scent as "some kind of metallic mixture of other things that I just didn't know how to describe."
That part of the story is actually true, Alex Walker, a spokesman for Lockheed Martin Space, told Business Insider.
Antonelli may have never made it his mission to recreate and bottle the scent - basically the smell of burnt metal - for public consumption, as the video claims, but, with his help, Lockheed did manage to develop a scent similar to what Antonelli encountered.
"We actually developed fragrance samples based on Tony's guidance," Walker said. "His whole story of the smell of space, we took his guidance down to a local perfumery in Denver and bottled it."
The company created three different scents, and then Lockheed excitedly determined which one most closely matched the smell described by the former Space Shuttle pilot.
"It's like one of those fragrance samples you'd get at the mall," Walker said, adding that the company produced roughly 2,000 sample bottles to hand out at next week's Space Symposium in Colorado.
So Lockheed successfully bottled the so-called "smell of space," an unbelievable feat done as part of a very elaborate joke.
"The reason we did this was to remind that the men and women of Lockheed Martin Space have been building spacecraft for more than sixty years," Walker told Business Insider.
"We thought it was a great time to remind people of that. It is a reminder of unmatched expertise in the space industry, but also, it's a reminder that we're humans."