A NASA Employee Has One of the Weirdest Jobs in the World And He Has Been At It For 50 Years

When a whisk of air flows into the nostrils, most people just smell it and move on, but not George Aldrich. Aldrich not only pays keen attention to each smell but also plays games with odors. For him, nothing is disgusting or pleasant, it’s just another smell. He smells anything and everything, not because of lunacy but because it’s his job. For the past three decades, Aldrich has dedicated the superpower of his strong-smelling nose to NASA. Day after day, he sits in his lab in New Mexico, smelling everything from teddy bears to tampons and socks, to make sure that they’re not nauseating. 

A bad smell, according to him, can make astronauts sick. And so, no object, be it a hairpin or a book, none enters a space shuttle unless it has been approved by Aldrich. "I have been a Chemical Specialist at NASA for 44 years. I primarily do toxicity tests on objects before they go into space. I am also a volunteer on NASA's odor panel. We test the smells of all items that will be within the habitable areas of the International Space Station and check for disagreeable or offensive smells [that] may nauseate astronauts and possibly put astronauts' productivity and mission at risk," Aldrich described in a Reddit post.

Odor-testing is something that NASA takes very seriously because, in the closed-loop environment of space, an astronaut can’t just roll out a window to breathe in fresh air. Most of the air is just recirculated within the space station. Even the slightest foulness in the smell can throw the astronauts off the center, making it challenging, if not impossible for them to continue the mission. It is not a surprise that some Russian cosmonauts were forced to abort a mission in 1976 due to an unbearable stench lingering in the space vessel, Aldrich revealed in a Reddit comment.

NASA usually has four volunteers along with Aldrich in their smell test panel who smell everything before it is sent to space. They rank everything with a rating from 0 to 4. Anything that scores a rating higher than 2.5 is rejected for the space mission. For instance, ABC News reported that the first woman to travel to space, Sally Ride, wanted to carry a mascara on the space mission. But it was rejected by Aldrich and didn’t make it to the space shuttle. While smelling each object, the volunteers run a blind test, so as not to let their eyes cloud the judgment of their noses.

While most of the items are tested correctly, sometimes a smell just slips through their noses. "Velcro straps, we tested them, and they stunk to high heaven. They tested the components separately and when they slapped them together, they assumed they would pass the toxicity and odor test. When they got to space, one of the astronauts opened the Velcro and they stunk the place up. On a scale of 0-4, one was 3.6 and the other 3.8. Objectionable and revolting," Aldrich said about one such occasion, on Reddit.

Aldrich’s unusual job has earned him a full bag of nicknames including “NASA’s chief sniffer,” “master sniffer,” “NASA’s Nosem” “Nasalnaut” and “Nostrildamus.” His colleagues call him the “Most Smella Fella,” per WIRED. But despite his extensive experience of over 900 smell tests, there are certain things that even he can’t sniff in advance. Farts, for instance. "Human beings stink and there's not too much we can do about it," Aldrich wrote on Reddit. "There's flatulence, they've got to potty, they can stink up the place. They do try to keep themselves clean with antibacterial agents. Because of anti-gravity, they can't take a full-fledged shower because of the water. Humans stink, haha, there's nothing we can do about it," he quipped.