The astronaut compared the feeling of being in space with the symptoms of COVID-19

The sensations of being in space orbit can be compared to the symptoms of the CORONAVIRUS. This was announced by Marcus Pontes, the first Brazilian astronaut who flew to the ISS in 2006, broadcast was conducted on Instagram by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Now Pontes holds the post of Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation.

“When you get into space, for some reason [for a while] you lose your sense of smell, about the same as with covid-19 disease , and you don’t smell on the ISS,” Pontes said (TASS quote).

At the same time, he added that space itself has its own smell, as NASA astronaut Jeff Williams told him, who advised the Brazilian to sniff while opening the hatch after docking to the ISS. “I couldn’t believe it, but space smells of sulfur,” he clarified.

Pontes was trained as an aircraft mechanic, in 1998 NASA chose him as an astronaut candidate, two years later he officially became an astronaut. However, his flight into space was delayed for a long time: first for financial reasons, and after 2003 due to the disaster of the Columbia shuttle, then the US space agency suspended flights. In 2005, the Brazilian Space Agency and Roscosmos signed an agreement on space flight, after which Pontes was trained at the Yu.A. Gagarin. In March 2006, Pontes, along with Pavel Vinogradov and Jeffrey Williams, went to the ISS on the Soyuz TMA-8 spacecraft.

In July 2020, Pontes suffered COVID-19. At the same time, President Bolsonaro contracted the coronavirus.