The Astronaut's Carry-On
A pressurized cargo staging module at Boca Chica, Texas at 2:19 AM, where a SpaceX supply launch to the ISS is T-minus 53 minutes and a last-minute manifest discrepancy has everyone's radios crackling.
Two identical unmarked Pelican cases have ended up on the cargo pallet — one contains a $4.1 million crystallography experiment built by a team in Zurich over fourteen months, the other holds 22 kilograms of vacuum-sealed brisket from a Memphis-based caterer that an astronaut's family commissioned as a morale package. The shipping labels melted off when someone left both cases next to an auxiliary thruster exhaust vent. The Zurich PI is asleep and unreachable, the caterer's tracking number routes to a disconnected Google Voice line, and the payload integration team says they only have mass budget for one case. Double wants to crack both cases, sniff them, and load the right one — a technique he insists he perfected once before at a hospital loading dock. Bust wants to wake up the flight director and delay the load sequence, even though that risks missing the launch window entirely.
“I am literally one-for-one on high-stakes cooler identification, and that time it was four AM and I was on a motorcycle.”
“You want to open a sealed space payload because you once successfully distinguished a kidney from a fish — that's your résumé?”
Double cracked the first case, took one deep inhale, whispered 'hickory,' and loaded the second one — which turned out to contain the crystallography experiment, confirmed six hours later when the Zurich PI woke up screaming with joy. The brisket case, left behind on the tarmac, was discovered by a night-shift technician who fed the entire launch crew at sunrise.
The nose knows, and the nose has NEVER lost a case — pun extremely intended.
I want it on record that we sent a $4.1 million experiment to space based on a man's claimed ability to smell smoked meat through a waterproof seal.