Astronauts who've done spacewalks describe it consistently - burnt metal, a little like rum, sometimes raspberries. That's not nothing. There has to be a chemical explanation for why a vacuum produces a detectable smell on a suit. I've never seen a satisfying answer to this.
The polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon hypothesis actually explains the raspberry thing - PAHs are produced in stellar nurseries and some of them smell sweet. The burnt metal notes are probably from ionized particles on the suit surface reacting to vacuum exposure then air. This is one of those questions that has a real chemical answer that just hasn't been written up for a general audience.
Wait, the raspberry thing is real? I always thought that was a meme. Someone send help.
Entirely real. Sagittarius B2, a molecular cloud near the galactic centre, contains ethyl formate, which smells of rum and raspberries. It's not accessible via spacewalk obviously but the compound exists in space.
What I find interesting is that the smell is technically from the suit, not from space itself. You can't smell a vacuum. So the question is really: what chemical residue does low-Earth orbit deposit on EVA suits, and why does it consistently smell the same to different astronauts? That consistency is the interesting data point.
space smells like rum and i cannot think of better news